Beer in Mind - Postmortem
What is the game about?
In Beer in Mind, play as the bartender of a small pub located in a downtown suburbs. You will find soon enough that the world is not as big as it seems and that your customers have their own secrets.
This game is a point & click, all playable with your mouse.
=> Page entry
The original ideas
A few days after the submissions, we thought it would be interesting to share with you a bit of how we spent this 38th edition of the Ludum Dare at the PixelStuff team. We were 7 in our team for this edition, 2 designers, 4 developers, 1 sound designer.
The first day, we mainly gathered ideas and set up the whole gameplay mechanisms we wanted to make in an ideal world. This allowed us to choose where to cut functionnalities we could not fit in the 48 hours left. Our brainstorming highlighted that we were deeply interested in gameplay axed towards simulation and management games. We liked the idea of having a small place to manage for the player. At first, we thought of using the environment of a desert island, planet, ecosphere... and the idea of a bar came in.
We chose this one, it fitted the theme perfectly: a bar is a small world itself, with its own rules, its usual clients and its ressources (beer, tv, doritos...). We also liked the idea to put together a gameplay and the proverb "It's a small world".
The ideal version of Beer in Mind is a game where the player would have to manage his bar (ordering supplies like beers, changing music or tv programs according to the people in the pub, make money, ect...) and be the witness of storylines evolving within the bar. Groups of character would interact positively or negatively and you would have had to be sure those who didn't liked each other would not meet if you wanted to keep your bar safe, you would discover that some of them knew each others without knowing it... and many other ideas I can't list here.
48 hours left to make a game
Finally we kept a few interactions available and linked them to scenariis to provide a prototype of how your actions on the environment could affect the characters you're interacting within the bar.
We chose to keep at least:
- The idea of serving beers to clients,
- Being able to turn on/off the tv
- Calling a cab/the cops
- A few other elements only usable in some specific cases (no spoilers)
We put aside the idea of complexifying the gameplay by adding ressources management and money management and focused onto the scenario. It was a pretty challenging stuff to create and find a tool simple enough to allow the team to make quick edits to the scenario and adjusting the timings.
One of our developer adapted during the 24hours a nodal tool interface to edit datas we would export as a JSON file to change the scenariis deployed in the game. The whole thing is also completed by a random quotes generator created via a .CSV file.
The last hours were mainly dedicated to creating scenariis, implement them, testing them, correcting bug, creating the UI, the game overall looks and integrating them in Unity so that everything worked fine.
What we learned/What is the future?
We knew from the start we would not be able to add everything we thought of, which would have created a deepest experience of the game.
Today, Beer in Mind needs polishing on the clickable items, the timing of the scenarios, be more dynamic, have more player rewards in UI interactions, a more coherent graphic direction and a LOT of user testing to polish it.
But we're kinda happy with how it turned out. A bit disappointed too.
We had to do a lot of concessions into our original idea: from a management-simulation game with a red link scenario in the background, we ended up doing a point-and-click with advanced interactions onto objects and people.
The good point is that we are feeling within the team that there is a good game idea to dig and we will probably continue it after those 72hours, and even if the game we ended up with wasn't exactly what we wanted first, it was a pretty interesting prototype to make.
If you read all of that above, thank you for your time ❤️ You're awesome!
tld'nr: We made a simulation-management-point-and-click game we will probably continue developping after the LudumDare