Explore, gather and cook for your hungry bear companion in this immersive resource management game.
Role: game design, programming, visual design
Collaborators: Del Nordlund, Gareth Hudson
Date: December 2017
Scope: 1 week
Prompt: challenged to create a polished resource-based game
You can play the game from my itch.io, here.
Here's a playthrough, generously provided by Youtuber Myerax.
Core design goals:
Focus on game UX: player should understand what is interactable, and at no point feel confused
Minimal HUD UI: express information without cluttering the visual experience
Accessibility: easy to understand and visually inviting
Prioritizing game UX
Do Feed the Bears is a game designed around player-object interaction. In an earlier iteration, we found that players were not sure what exactly could be interacted with. To alleviate this, I focused my efforts on designing the strongest user experience possible for player-object interactions.
This involved:
Player feedback upon entering trigger range of an object
Visual and auditory feedback for both in-progress and completed tasks
Text pop-ups for resource gains
An inherently visible inventory, without a HUD
Providing feedback for uninteractable objects
Pushing for the implementation of a tutorial
After improving the game UX, we found that players knew exactly what the outcomes of their actions were, and were finding enjoyment in otherwise repetitive actions like gathering.
Stylistically functional
Funnily, a core driving force behind the creation of this game was the short transition between the exterior and interior of the house. In order to continue running the exterior systems while inside the house, we decided to have the whole game occur on a single scene. Implementing a screen wipe animation actually masked the instant transportation from inside to outside!
Inspired by pooling the interior and exterior, I applied this to other systems of the game too, with the added benefit of allowing for easy transition animations:
Applications of object pooling:
Berries - disappearing from bushes and reappearing on backpacks.
Stoves - hovering in the air before they are bought
UI elements - all instantiated during run-time, shown and hidden as necessary
Since the game is built on strong foundations, the game can be easily expanded without hitting performance problems!
Play the game from my itch.io, here.