BeardedBear is my biggest project so far. I worked on it for almost 3.5 years during my University life. I started the project alone and worked on it for almost a year before Alberto, a friend of mine, started to help me out with sound and programming. After another year Giacomo, another friend from University, joined the team and helped us with pixel art. Sadly, the project got suspended after some problems with the team and I couldn't keep it up alone anymore.

The prototypes

The game started out as a little learning experiment by trying to clone SuperCrateBox and adding realistic physics to it. At this stage the project was targeting mobile and was made with Lua and CoronaSDK. After messing around with the game for a while I started to feel that a touchscreen wasn't really a good fit for an arcade Platformer game, so I started to porting it to PC keeping Lua, but switching to Love2D. A couple months passed by, more features were added to the game, and Lua started to feel inadequate for a game with a growing scope like that. So I decided to throw everything in the trash again and restart one final time with GameMakerStudio. Now the unnecessary realistic physics was scrapped away, and the game started to have some interesting unique mechanics.

Core Design Elements

These were the main aspects of the game:

• Weapons are time based and only lasts 15 seconds before they overheat and explode.

• Each weapon is procedurally generated by combining a random weapon type and a random bullet type. Anything can come out (For example: flamethrowers that shoots rockets, lightning pistols, minigun that shoots other miniguns, and more).

• Each enemy killed drops exp bubbles. If the player grabs those up he will eventually level up and choose a powerup. Otherwise, the exp expire and goes to the enemies giving them the ability to level up and the player will be forced to choose a power up for them.

• The player needs to survive and kill enough enemies in the level to spawn a time portal to go to the next level.

• The weapons can be picked up by grabbing a crate. Every time a crate is picked up, a new one respawns somewhere in the level.

Conferences and Events

After 3 years of the development and a team of 3 people working on it, the project was starting to feel good and polished so we had the chance to present the game in a couple of conventions and events. Presenting a game to the public in real life and talk to them while they experience the game is a priceless experience and a really crucial thing to do while trying to beta test the game and understand what could be improved and what needs changes.

This was the setup for our first public event:

Even if the game development got suspended, it takes a special place in my heart for being my first real game and coding project. It has been a huge learning experience.

External Links

- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yaPZY4X-AY
- IndieDB Page: http://www.indiedb.com/games/beardedbear
- TIGSource Thread: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=54839