Development Time: June-August 2021

Team Size: 7

Team Members: Osage Kaczor (UI Designer), Dan Waleik (Level Designer), Mac Soulsby (Sound Designer), Demetri Nekos (Lead Programmer and Product Owner), Maximus Lorah (Systems Programmer), and Jenny Caplan (Artist)

Technology: Unity

Platform: PC

Role: Lead Designer, Systems Designer, Narrative Designer, Producer

Gameplay Demo

Intent

Bears With Guns is a couch co-op twin stick/stealth shooter. It is a chaotic, high action shooter where the player has to infiltrate a giant beehive. In order to kill bees and steal honey, the player will alternate between stealth and shooting mechanics. Stealth will depend on a cloak which will lose effectiveness as the player bumps into more objects.

My Contribution

For this project I was the lead designer, narrative designer, systems designer, and producer. I mainly focused on narrative and systems, being responsible for creating the world, the characters and classes, and balancing the weapons and enemies.

As a lead, I spent lots of time on this project recruiting and onboarding new members, and communicating with the other designers, artist, and programmers. I made an Inspiration Document, which showed what the inspiration for each gun and bee type was, to help onboard our artist and give her an idea of what I was thinking in addition to a Character Document to summarize each bear class.

Narrative

To solidify Bears With Guns’ narrative, I made a Narrative Document to outline the overarching narrative of the game and go into detail on the backstories of each bear. I also did some research on bees that influenced both the narrative and the systems, including the cloak and the enemy types.

Systems

When working on the systems for this game, I focused heavily on making each class feel viable. If a player chose to play as the Bee Bear and found out that their shotgun paled in comparison to the Panda Bear’s heavy machine gun, they’d regret their choice. I considered the time to kill for each gun on each enemy and the damage per clip combined with their unique quirks to make sure that no gun felt too powerful.

Postmortem

Bears With Guns was a success overall, with everyone on the team working extremely hard to deliver a complete level with sound, art, and UI. Unfortunately, many things had to get cut. Multiple enemy types, an upgrade system, much of the narrative, and an instructions page in the menu were some of the things that couldn’t be implemented before the final version was due. However, I am still proud of what did make it into the game. The 4 classes, the two bee types, and the overall feel of the game were all great. For more information on the creation of the game and my experience as a producer on this team, check out my blog linked below!