From Pitch to Pancakes: How 'Bear and Breakfast' Blended Genres To Succeed

[Music] we're going to talk about Baron breakfast um for those of you who haven't heard about bear and breakfast before uh it's a laidback management Adventure game where you build and run a bed and breakfast but you're a bear and that on its own doesn't mean much especially since PC Gamers said that the lateb man agement Adventure is whatever your boss is off doing when uh he takes a 2hour lunch so to give you a slightly better clue we're going to have to watch a very very short [Music] trailer so as you can see the game has some crafting it has some building some

decorating some talking some walking um some heavy UI action and even a map that we added way too late um but of course it has its central element a bear and uh before the game could look like this uh unfortunately had to look like this uh I don't know why the universe works the way that it does but it just needed to look this bad uh so we could all look be in a room together um but anyway by talking about our game and how we got it from point A to point be uh I'll attempt to answer a question that was on my mind while developing it and maybe some of you have thought of uh as well before how do you approach an increasingly saturated Indie scene there's so many games out there um I'll do that by kind of showing you how we tried failed and sometimes succeeding at standing out by uh mixing and bashing a few game genres together and I know what you're all thinking it's pretty

simple just add a bear um of course it's a tried and uh true tactic that worked for a lot of extraordinary games of course I'm talking about enir bird 2000 a masterpiece that's such an a high level that I I still aspire to reach one day but before I get too excited about this uh I'll tell you a bit about myself my name is Rish uh I'm a 30-year-old developer from Romania which is in Eastern Europe uh I don't know why I picked this photo this is in France uh anyway 2016 I also started a company called gummy cat uh it's a game development studio also based in Romania and for the first few years it was just by Me by myself it's kind of screwing around uh and eventually we kind of began developing Baron breakfast as more of a team in about 2020 um with me was yuana our our director and my partner and andu who's our Pro programmer uh lead programmer uh but wait we're in Indie Studio that means we wear a lot of hats

and sometimes against our better judgment um but wait we're in Indie Studio which meant that we were actually more than just three people we were five but it wasn't for the whole period of time it was just so it's weird to define the court team because not everyone worked for the same amount of time but wait we're in Indie studio so uh that meant that a lot of people actually worked on the game from QA localization contractors our publisher also helped um so it was something like 50 people in the end that just touched the game at some point and in any case I'm going to tell you the story about how we got to doing something that everyone here has either done or aspires to one they do which is to push this little green button in steam's backend uh and this as all you all know is a very relaxing and peaceful experience it's comparable to a day at the spa and in order to do that I'll just quickly uh present throughout the whole presentation uh what we pitched to Publishers and investors in the summer of 201 19 and compar it to

what we eventually launched in the world uh kind of to see if we kept our promise and we had if we had a through line that survived like the whole process and as a side note um our pitch was sent to something like 70 uh Publishers and investors out of which 15 never got back to us at all uh about 25 responded and after talking and negotiating we refused or we were refused by about 24 but that's all right since in the end we only needed one to sign the game and make it happen which we did thanks to uh Armor Games our publisher which some of them are here as well um and also our pitch deck is online you can actually see it see the exact thing that we use to pitch the game and and get a deal out of it it's on this website from a company called Hey glitch uh who have a thing called Founders kit uh also has other pitch decks it's really good it's a great resource it's resource you should really see it and from now on if there's ever a an image or a slide from our original pitch te it'll have have this handy little annotation cool just

to give you a a little bit of insight of what's coming up I'm going to talk about what blending genres meant to us uh and kind of our process and then we'll tle tackle the genres that uh make up B breakfast so adventure and management and kind of like how we Blended them together how we smashed them um what really worked in this process and then what didn't or you know the mistakes that we made along the way cool cool let's go so mixing genres it's not a novel concept uh it's not like a top 10 secret tactic that Publishers will hate you for uh there's plenty of games that Implement multiple elements from multiple genres all the time but mostly with budgets much much higher than uh what a firsttime studio from middle of nowhere Eastern Europe could like realistically uh aim for uh for our first title um this like the original pitch back in 2019 promised roughly the

same thing as today management Adventure game uh but if you really think about it combining genres seems like a straightforward idea for about three seconds until you realize there's like no way you can actually Bear the weight of what this kind of combination inherently implies and it can be like a very very daunting and prone to overpromise process so within the context of a small theme with limited budget limited development time like limited space in our brains um the more genres we like kind of aim to combine the more we'll have to strip away from each of those genres in order to actually ship let alone to ship something that you're happy with um and especially something that players would like because given player expectations and based on like common knowledge and games they've played pre previously you could easily find yourself in a mess um like too far gone to realistically bring it all together before you launch um and

uh yeah how exactly did we measure or decide on the features of uh or elements of the genres that we needed to take away from uh for the game I think it's a more complex answer that I could realistically say in a 30 minute lecture but for us it boiled down to perceived player expectations so we had to make a decision pretty early on uh in the process on which expectations we really aim to fulfill and which we were okay with kind of disappointing some players on uh it's impossible to meet everyone's expectations anyway and this just added another layer of complexity to the problem and then once you do all of this you have to hope that your original Vision that you had from the start is strong enough to hold through all the circles of game development from pitching through production and especially marketing um but let's talk about some concrete examples so what makes be and breakfast an adventure game let me ask you what thing pops into your mind if

you think about a shooter tag on Steam that's pretty straightforward but what about Adventure uh we called it an adventure game but we quickly found that it's like you know trying to categorize dishes in a restaurant by which ones you salt according to steam tags VR chat is an adventure game but so is god of war and so is Terraria and so is valheim and that's not really helpful when you're trying to explain what your game is in more detail so because of the weight of that Adventure qualifier we decided to focus our our efforts like on a specific part of the genre that we could actually realistically deliver uh specifically we wanted to signal that our game had a rich narrative that would help immerse you in the world so for us Adventure in the end just meant story and characters now I was born in Romania and it had a pretty rough time up until like 30 years ago uh and it wasn't exactly known for for like its rich and

outstanding characters and stories but I was born right on time for like Western pop culture to kick in and filled my tiny child brain which was starving for an escape at the time so for me shows like The Simpsons were Peak comedy and almost a religious experience uh Homer Simpson as you know as you maybe know is a naive and lovable but a little dumb kind of character so I'd like you I like to introduce you all to Hank Hank is the main character in buron breakfast now I'm going to talk a lot about Hank and quite frankly because I want to drive home a point that is very important to me and I think that it's important in developing any story based thing but especially video games which is build your character and I mean really build your character Define them develop them give them lives give them quirks and features just make them funny make them sad whatever you do don't make them boring make them interesting super easy uh when we developed our p we had a pretty good idea of what Hank needed to

be and we knew we'd need to spend some serious time polishing him up uh both for his art Direction his animation his personality um and I think it was one of the best decisions we could make to build him up as much as possible it took about 12 months out of our process to just get the final Hank um we kept pushing his design forward kept iterating we needed him to feel right because the game centered around this character who the player had to actually perceive and not just project themselves onto so one of the core parts of Hank is his adorable walk cycle which this was not it uh we kept iterating we invested a lot of time and effort in there were many walk Cycles arguably this was the second best after the one we actually picked uh but we took some really serious time in exploring all the ways a bear could walk until it was funny looking enough weighty and made us kind of happy to just walk around in the world with and after all of that we finally landed

on psych there were even more walk Cycles it was a lot of walk Cycles but anyway we finally landed on something we were actually proud of and I really want to emphasize how important this long period of constant iteration turned out to be because Hank is arguably the most successful part of the game and I think like a lot of the game's achievements rest on his little shoulders now the game also has a handful of other VAR characters some of which create were created to kind of subtly support a role within the gamees mechanics uh which I'll talk about a little bit later uh Beyond this narrative box that they needed to fill uh even if they didn't matter to the gameplay though characters always needed to serve a purpose uh either moving the story forward or supporting the main character um and like I said we also we designed characters that ended up actually informing mechanics rather than the other way around for example this

little person right here his name is Tuk this little dumpster raccoon would obviously be associated with garbage and as a side note you'd think that the name Tuk comes from a combination of Tom and Nook and you'd be right but he also has kind of a Duo character that hasn't been revealed yet but like they're kind of a pair and it's kind of a love letter to peragine took and is also the past tense of the verb to take because he's a little thief and I'm very proud of that anyway uh in the game the player has to deal with the plague that is human beings specifically tourists worst I a tourist uh if you haven't played the game the G guests rate their vacation with you through like a simple Point based system for things like Comfort hygiene food and also decoration uh and humans also unfortunately really like to leave garbage everywhere uh it negatively impacts decoration score and it just makes things ugly and as a player you have to find all the garbage

and pick it up so while developing this we realized that hey our little dumpster diver could serve a very logical mechanical role in the game we could turn the garbage you collect into currency and then exchange it for decorative items in a shop that took would own cool um after characters the second part of our adventure qualifier is the story of the game which is a very linear one and that's arguably an odd choice in a game like this mainly because uh a linear story doesn't usually mean uh a lot of replayability and that kind of is an important part of a management style game um you can also make choices in a game but they're not real just like real life uh instead we use them as kind of a progression gate or as a way to break the dialogue to give the player a bit of like a rest in between the more text Heavy conversations but also as a way to Showcase Hank's personality so for

example whenever Hank talked to humans as opposed to talking to other animals uh no matter what the player chose in the dialogue option the result would always be bare noises um and would sometimes like make them more personable through text formatting uh we also used comic book style cut scenes this was really important for us to be able to have a lot of flexibility in defining some story moments which we otherwise couldn't have done with a theme of our size and there's also some Secrets here and there in the game uh there's diverse areas and you wouldn't really find any of the secrets if you didn't look for them but we felt it was important to add and speaking of Secrets there are also plenty of secrets in the story of the game but they're all optional beyond the main part of the story and last but not least the ending of the game is pretty open-ended which we did from like a desire to tell a deep ER story than we could ship originally so we left a lot

of loose threads that we could hang on to and we're still like kind of developing um and also let the player be able to continue the management gameplay once they're done with the story so in my mind the based on like what we had in our original pitch deck uh We've threaded the needle on story and characters decently well and even if we don't have puzzles or combat this wasn't an issue because we satisfied everything all the elements we wanted to highlight from this genre and we were kind of happy with the distillation of having Adventure in our game to summarize the main pillars we had to define the adventure elements of the game were a very polish main character with a well defined cast of supporting characters a strong linear storyline mainly told through like secondary characters with some added mystery for spice and a very varied and interesting world with small secrets to reward exploration cool but what about the meat

of the game the rest of the game what about management well management is far easier to categorize in your head for me it brings up things like roller coaster tycoon or city city skylines um but it still kind of bears a lot of weight it's arguably more than Adventure because ad management games have historically attracted uh players who are looking for deeper mechanics kind of and they can sometimes be pretty hardcore about it but breakfast plays a little bit like a game called Theme Hospital which is one of my f favorite growing up uh and instead of being like an all controlling figure in the sky you use Hank to do crafting and some of the building mostly and when we were picking the loop um for pitching the game we had a pretty straightforward one in mind and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out eventually cuz we have a game where you can scavenge for Mater materials craft furniture place it in the the hotel rooms that you build and

then accept guests and manage them and if you get tired of all that you can just do a little exploring for more M materials and secrets so in the end a pretty complex overall tight game Loop right I'm so happy we didn't do something really dumb like over scoping and adding like a card-based cooking mini game or a clothing and trinket system that further added complexity to the gameplay Loop and unfor interet reality uh for modern developers I feel is that you're kind of playing to the tune of successful and influential games that came before yours so for us that meant that there are a lot of quality of life expectations uh for modern management games especially in UI and ux and this adds on top of your already really heavy workload uh Terraria has an auto stored inventory button why doesn't yours World of Warcraft has autoloot on containers where's yours um so while we kept having to add and

add and add things to the game um I felt like we couldn't afford to descope because we'd I felt like we'd lose uh risk losing the players interest in the management mechanics we also sprinkled new mechanics from the start of the game all the way throughout the end in an attempt to kind of keep things fresh so even in the last area as you discover it you still found a new mechanic that you didn't have like 20 hours earlier in the game to summarize the core of the management aspect of the game we kind of prioritized a very tight Loop that didn't rush the player to Pro progress and allowed us to introduce new gameplay all throughout the game we had a pretty simple resource system um that felt familiar enough and felt like it provided a familiar and satisfying crafting experience and it didn't really become a grind uh and managing groups rooms and guests was simplified to like a point-based system that was pretty relaxed but we had just enough room for

the Min maxer Min maxers out there so now with the two genres covered let's talk about how we kind of blend them together with some specific examples like I mentioned before uh combining genres is a very deliberate choice to make your life harder but when you can get it to work it can make you feel very smart and that's like the kind of small win wins that you need to feed on during game development for example we realized that we could automate some of the micromanagement mechanics we introduced very early in the game and it would go a really long way towards freeing up the player in the end game and allow them to spend more time doing things that maybe they found to be fun like exploring decorating mid maxing whatever we made four possible automations around accepting guests around garbage around food for example um we realized that instead of going

like the generic route that some uh management games doe of hiring staff in the game from a randomly generated pool we could instead make it more like a more personalized experience with the characters that you kind of grew up with in the game and kind of connected through for instance instead of going uh to every hotel in the whole game and kind of making sure rooms are booked and turning a profit you could hire Gus the pum as a is as a concierge um and he would welcome your guests and be an allaround helpful and kind presence uh or instead for instance if you didn't want to clear the garbage in every single house by yourself you could hire Wade the rat and raade Wade would just run around and get all of the currency for you simultaneously kind of giving you passive income and keeping your cabins clean of course Wade is a much cuter connoisseur of garbage compared to

TK direct H and all of these services in game cost money well ingame money of obviously and you couldn't just hire this character from the start but you could instead progress their quests to a certain point which allowed us to kind of pace the game intuitively and give the player like get them get them acquainted with these characters and the micromanagement tasks first and then give them a choice to be like spend some profit and have a an easier life in the game um and then uh they could make this Choice our pitch also had an element of progress and difficulty which translated well in the final game this is pinfall pinfall is the very last area and it had like three full cabins all the mechanics unlocked and you basically had the task of making as much money as possible in order to advance the story and finish the game um we also pitched the story progression through bigger and bigger areas which also translate translated well into the game in the end but in

this original uh slide in the pitch deck uh this wasn't about progression this was about making the game a Rog likee management game which I'm so happy we didn't do um so in the end this kind of combination really worked out uh and it was because of the compromises we made and not despite them we wouldn't have been able to deliver like a fully fledged Adventure game whatever that means or a very deep management game but we did end up with a very solid blend and players really seem to appreciate that so that brings me to what actually worked the overall success and perks that we got due to blending genres well it allowed us to kind of synthesize the essentials of each game category and kind of pick our desired elements and let us be focused on each of them it helped us play through our strengths both creatively and prodo production although as you'll see towards the end not all the time and the things like I

mentioned earlier like hiring established characters as staff in the cabins was a really big strength point it gave a deeper sense of purpose to the task itself because it was a character you cared about and this could be a talk in itself but I really want to mention some small marketing beats specifically on Twitter that I really love uh Katherine who's here today our community manager from our publisher had a talk on this subject which was really good but basically um using Hank as a voice for our Twitter account was a really solid Choice given how complex of a character he is um there was also a moment when Unity decided to award us like a third place most anticipated game in 2020 after silk song and League of Legends wild drift or we had to announce a delay in the game at one point and we were really really surprised to see that our community rallied behind us really hard and these last two ones like don't aren't really related to mixing genres

but I still love them uh but I do think our approach gave some of our bigger Partners the confidence to Showcase us multiple times like for instance Nintendo always uh helped us by putting our trailers up on their channels and it helped us immensely throughout it gave us it put a lot of eyes on us so in the end the perks of kind of mixing the genres for us mixing adventure and management um our team was kind of better positioned to take on production of M we picked rather than try to do sorry try to do everything at once from just one genre uh the combination of elements from each genre kind of complemented each other even from the concept stage and it made like our overall Vision stronger so it was a great tool to validate and kind of make that Vision better uh and the game was kind of originally born out of a desire for more management games with a more developed narrative and this uh really gave us a really concrete Niche to feel it really helped us find our our place

in the world overall the positives really shine through for us but as you all know it can't always be Rosy so what about what didn't work or better yet like I like to call it what about the mistakes uh well for example um the start of the game is really slow like there's a bunch of front-loaded story which I'm still very happy about uh because you meet some of my favorite characters at the start of the game but it can take players like up to 30 minutes before they get to build anything and that can turn off a lot of people like just looking to start building something um in addition to the slow start we chose to add like optional quests very early in the game uh and we didn't give a specific explicit Pathway to progress in the main storyline and you know and not being very explicit about the optional Quest being well optional um just the this kind of LED players to being very confused as the

start and getting a lot of support tickets for people saying they were soft lock despite that not being the case this came like from an over indulgence in trying to mix uh the narrative with the management uh we also tried our best to mention that the game was on the Casual side even in the first description text you see on about the game on the steam page for instance uh but I don't know if we could even actually fix this if we wanted to cuz we had players that were pretty upset that the game didn't offer more for instance freedom in time manipulation and didn't allow for a more straightforward management only experience because you that's what you'd expect from games in this genre and our desire to keep the story and management progression so intertwined forced us to limit these freedoms there's no sandbox mode yet um but on the other side we had players that were kind of pissed off that we didn't have enough character interaction like you there's no dating system there's no gifting or anything

like like in sard Valley for instance so we kind of had completes coming in from from both ends which we were expecting but still and finally uh the big one and kind of by far my biggest regret in the development of this game is the way uh we handled production sometimes uh in our pitch sck coming from a place of relatively little experience as a team we pitched a development time of 12 to 14 months from prototype to ship which was a wild plan to begin with um but in the end it took us over 30 and I know that doesn't sound like a long time anyway but it's it was like over double what the pitch was um and with the delays of course that meant more budget and our budget kind of exploded which is a lot uh it was quite a big margin and we were only able to do this because our publisher was cool and in the end uh will'll always be thankful for that

despite all this it kind of still led to a lot of difficult times during production which I feel personally a lot of regret for we had moments that felt pretty hopeless and very anxiety inducing like this screenshot from a zoom call Midway through development we were obviously having a great time and the personal failing of mine was taking on way more jobs than I could handle at once which led to certain aspects of the game falling behind I had to finish writing the game at this point but I was making these um these tweets were way less stressful than having to actually write a good story anyway in the end I'm happy to report that this wasn't always the case uh we were able to stick together we were able to learn from our mistakes as we went along and I know that not all teams are able to do that uh but having the game resonate with a lot of people very early on uh kept us kind of together and focus on shipping and combining genres served as a tool for us it allowed us to explore more facets of game development perxs making the game

stand out more and give us more opportunities for marketing and we did have happy moments during development as well in the end on July 28th 2022 we launched the game still together as a team quick recap to finish up why would you blend genres for a mini game well throwing currently popular genres in the bowl and seeing what Blends can be a valid approach for quick prototyping uh or like it can Define your whole game uh it's always a Gamble though it has to be utilized as a way to come up with an idea rather than a me method to strengthen an existing one uh you should have a good Vision um more and more games come out and Studios become more and more specialized in their Niche so kind of trying to mix and match genre elements feel like it's becoming more of a method to stand out and it's a great tool for a small team with limited resources but it should probably just not serve as a replacement for like that strong vision and like sturdy base thank you so much [Applause]

[Music] much