Baldwin's Bear
Role
Solo Developer
Engine
Gamemaker
Studio 2
Genre
Adventure
Platform
Steam
Itch.io
Year
2022
Design Pillars
Exploration, Vibrance,
Whimsy
84 Gamers Rated
"Very Positive" on Steam!
"It's really nice seeing how this game experiments with different artistic styles, and I thought the use of plasticine was really neat. The mini games are fun and the dialogue reminds me of quirky retro indie games. This game is a good time, I recommend giving it a try! :)"
Baldwin's Bear is a hobbyist project I developed in the later years of high school, designed as a game that represents - and to an extent recreates - feelings of childhood and the freedom and innocence associated with it.
Every aspect of the game was considerately designed with this experience in mind, from the messy plasticine art style, to the open structure level design which encourages curiosity and exploration, to the colourful carnival setting with its diverse set of cheery characters.
"Its a short game (I'm pretty sure I've done everything I could've) buts it's awesome, like really really good, this game has somehow captured the feeling I got when I played Crayon Physics Deluxe as a kid and its been a completely surreal experience.
I seriously adore the art style of everything in this game, the claymation, the little caricatures of the people youre talking to, the pixel art in the zombie game... This game was a real treat, thank you Oscar!"
- VulcanoLV on Steam
This image depicts the Baldwin's Bear's Reward Loop.
It's quite intuitive, and describes most of what the player does in the game at a high level.
However, there was a design problem I needed to solve in the game's development - incentivising exploration!
If there is one minigame that the player can reliably earn all their tickets from, then once they have found that they no longer need the explore step, then the Reward Loop (and Player Experience) is ruined.
To solve this, I balanced the minigame costs and rewards so that the player would need to gradually progress to higher level minigames and they earned more tickets.
Theoretically the player could grind on the early free minigames again and again until reaching the 10,000 tickets required to win, but players quickly realised that this was nowhere near optimal.
Thus, to beat the game the player needs to find the right minigame for their current amount of tickets, which means they constantly need to be exploring the world as they progress.