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of a lot of Independent Developers I’ve talked to them over the years, first revealing the different and unusual ways they’ve brought game development. But Bear and Breakfast creator Rareș Cinteză is the first developer I’ve talked to who not only didn’t think he’d ever become a game developer, he actively didn’t. could be for a long time.
“It felt like one of those ‘for other people’ kind of things,” he told me recently from Bear and Breakfast before the recent launch of PC.
Although Cinteză didn’t think he was cut out for the job, he still liked the idea of making games. So he started volunteering at conferences like GDC, doing graphic designs for things like posters, and talking to developers. Eventually, this brought him to a developer and publisher, who brought him on board to do some marketing… which slowly turned into game development. Cinteză did.
Once his feet were wet in development, however, Cinteză wanted to take a step further and make his own game, and thus Bear and Breakfast was born. It was Syntheza’s first “real game dev project” from start to finish, as well as the first major project by most of the other team members at Gummy Cat Studio. Synthez says he learned Unity while working on B&B.
Bear and Breakfast originates from the tone in the name and the whole concept was born from the love of Syntheza management like Theme Hospital. The original plan, Sinteza says, was to have the bear eat the guests – making them “breakfast” of the bear and breakfast. But while this is funny, when it doesn’t complement the management playstyle, they’ve opted to do something more comfortable.
So what I’ve been playing for the past week is Bears and Breakfast, a very mild thing. It follows a bear named Hank and his friends – all goofy college students who go home for summer break with a level of consciousness and maturity – who have been recruited by a mega-corporation to run successful Airbnbs in the middle of their forest. A home for those who want to escape to nature. Hank begins by fixing up a wooden shack with an old bed and cheap decorations (dubbed a “talk” after the enterprising raccoon literally replaces trash), but as he acquires more properties, he goes from bad to worse, fixing up other dilapidated human structures. In the forest, and attracts more and more people to the area.
As far as the comfort pole goes, Syntheza and his team nailed the vibe. Main character Hank looks like he’s straight out of We Bare Bears (and actually has a Grizzly plush behind him as we speak, Syntheza), and the smooth and cute animations of him and his friends make it look like a cartoon of the week special that’s more comforting than playful. Although the initial set-up is pretty impressive when it comes to the display windows, 30 minutes later I’m setting up a renovated shack with ramshackle furniture and paintings, obviously bears, to attract customers.
Early on, Bear and Breakfast will open, allowing guests to roam leisurely and focus on building their property, while residents eager to learn about the great mysteries surrounding the forest and the past disaster that destroyed so many can pursue the larger narrative. I’m having a hard time saying which bit I like best in both the animal dialogue and the descriptions of the items, especially the bear and the breakfast, which is great and funny writing.
Carrying the workload
Bears and Breakfast is a big win for a first game, especially since the development wasn’t as smooth as the end result. Gummy Cat is a five-person team (plus a few international contractors) based in Romania, where the indie game development scene is very small. Given the group’s relative greenness, Syntheza says it was difficult at first to get publishing and funding — though previous connections through The Awesome Guys helped.
Once the group got the money it needed, more accidents occurred.
First, the team had to find a programmer. They searched for someone in Romania and finally found someone they wanted to work with. Within two weeks, they met in person, signed contracts, set up email accounts, made plans, discussed the game in this figure, and did everything necessary to establish a new person as a studio employee. Everything seemed fine. But then, out of nowhere, their new programmer completely freaked out the rest of the team – they wouldn’t respond to messages or even respond to attempts to reach them.
A week later, Gummy Cat found out through their company’s G Suite that their new programmer had set up a crypto-miner using servers they had procured through Google for the game – charging them hundreds of dollars in service fees. Gummy Cat explained the scam to Google and fortunately managed to get the payment cancelled, and they found a new programmer who wasn’t a scam artist, but it was a shaky start.
Then, there was a more obvious and global problem: the Covid-19 pandemic. Gummy Cat started working on Bear and Breakfast from a new studio in February 2020. As soon as they settled in and enjoyed working together in person, they had to switch to remote work – which Synthez says had a huge impact. The first six to eight months of production.
And, he adds, even without a global pandemic, Bears and Breakfast was an extremely difficult thing to create, especially for a new studio like Gummy Cat.
“Making a deep, strategic leadership game like our first game was a stupid idea,” he says. “Very system-heavy game [that was] Pretty cute, but hard to pull off, I’d say. That has a bigger impact on performance than you might think, because pixel art can be pretty, but it can usually be less taxing on a system. If you want to have the crisp-looking cartoon art like we do with frame animations, so you can strategically have a huge stage where you have 50 guests at a time and doing stuff…this can add up quickly. So we definitely made a lot of mistakes.
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“And that leads me to, I’m sure it’s a standard problem with indie studios these days, but the only way we can make up for it is to be broke. And I feel like a lot of it is on my shoulders. Because we’ve all made mistakes, but knowing those mistakes and knowing how to treat them and how to move on from them is something that I personally feel like if I had experience, I could have done a better job, but I didn’t. . So we didn’t, and that ended up being pretty tough with the usual work and hoping for a good presentation that wasn’t very good. Especially if we want to build something in the future. Make our first game, put it out there, and hopefully keep making games after that.
Cinteză is candid about his struggles with arthritis. Although he never thought it would happen to him and his team, the reality of trying to do such a complex project at some point had to give. There was a limit to how long the money could last them, and the various sources of funding were less likely to risk such a new group, so if Bear and Breakfast didn’t perform within a certain time, the money would simply run out and they would be done.
That problem, combined with the severity of the outbreak, took a heavy toll on Gammy cats as well as humans, Cinteză said. This is why Gummy Cat recently delayed its Nintendo Switch version.
“A really long streak can be close to three years,” he said. “And three years isn’t that long compared to other indie developers. I’ve heard a lot, but we still feel like we have to finish the game and we have to push it because we’re reaching the limits of our intellectual capacity. And after this game is finished, we need to be able to disconnect as people and see where we are.”
Now, at the end of all their struggles and Bear and Breakfast on PC via Steam, Cinteză is proud of the work he and Gummy Cat have done on Bear and Breakfast. And he tells me that he is especially proud that they were able to represent Romania in that work.
“I’m pretty sure we’re the first indie developer from Romania to appear in Nintendo’s indie world,” he said. “I think eight or nine months after we started working on it, it was the first point where it felt like, ‘OK, we’re really going somewhere.’ We’re definitely on to something.’ And it was very, very reassuring. We were filled with great joy. Like the first interesting points after the outbreak.
Cinteză says he wants to continue making games as a team after Gummy Cat Bear and Breakfast, thanks to the new experience and transparency that publishing a first game has given them. But like many indie projects, that’s entirely dependent on enough success for Bear and Breakfast. If they don’t have the resources to start a new project, the team can break up and join other projects individually.
Still, Syntheza hopes it won’t come to that, and even if it does, he intends to keep making games — it’s part of who he is now. Even after four years of working on The Awesome Guys, Three Bears and Breakfast, The Played Game, and several game development war stories, Syntheza laughs, “I still don’t feel like a real game developer.
Rebecca Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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