7/2/2023 0 Comments Beans quest music pocket gamer![]() “We’ve definitely grown as a studio and as individuals in terms of our skills. “Making a sequel requires a strange balance between creating a great experience for new players who are unfamiliar with your earlier game and simultaneously providing a fulfilling experience for veterans,” he explains. Talking with Tom, you get a real sense of Kumobius as a studio feeling its way through game development, constantly learning and improving with no formal experience, and the intervening period of three years between Bean’s Quest and Bean Dreams was clearly one of developmental significance for all the team. So, the groundwork was set with Bean's Quest, and the press had given a near-universal thumbs-up to the young studio. ![]() Intentionally designing levels around that concept and also balancing other interesting achievements like the fruit and the axolotl is pretty interesting.” “It was pretty clear as soon as we discovered that gameplay element that it would be the crux of the game design. ![]() This discovery actually caused us to redo the entire first release of Bean’s Quest - which, admittedly, was a small amount of content originally.” “Almost immediately the idea of jump par as an alternative metric popped into our heads and it just made perfect sense. “During one of those iterations - in which the stages were considerably longer than they are in the final version - we had the idea of a speed-run or time-attack mode like classic games had.” “With Bean’s Quest, we iterated on the original first world of content several times,” Greenaway recalls. The idea of jump par as an alternative metric popped into our heads and it just made perfect sense Tom Greenaway Of course, one of the concepts behind Bean’s Quest which did strike gold - certainly an area for gentle refinement rather than overhauling - was the golf-style par for each level, which encourages you to be particularly economical with how many bounces you use to reach the end goal of each stage. How can we take those ideas and refine them?” So in many ways Bean Dreams felt like a ‘Take 2’ of Bean’s Quest. Stuff that felt like unfinished business.’ “After we finished Bean’s Quest, we looked back over it and thought: ‘Okay, there are actually a lot of ideas we didn’t explore. ![]() “We poured a lot of energy and ideas into Bean’s Quest but we didn’t come up with a good structure or process at the start for creating updates to the game,” he goes on. “I think, as is typical with many budding game developers, we made a few mistakes and one of them wasn’t thinking ahead very far. “At the very beginning of Bean’s Quest’s development we were just starting as a studio and it was our first game,” says Tom. Kumobius co-founder Tom Greenaway, producer of Bean Dreams, told us about some of the lessons learned by him and his team between Bean’s first outing and his 2014 return. However, there are inevitably always things to improve, and that’s what last year’s sequel aimed to address. ![]() The design was bright and inviting, and the conception of the titular Bean as a constantly bouncing protagonist neatly sidestepped the slippery control issue of platformers on touchscreen. When Melbourne-based indie studio Kumobius released Bean’s Quest in 2011, it received a lot of praise.Īnd deservedly so - here was a small team, which then consisted of only three people, putting out a remarkably assured debut. ![]()
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