The Game
Barnaby B. Brixton and His Bedazzling Bean Belt is a game we created in 36 hours during the annual Hagenberg Game Jam.
You take on the role of the modest bean farmer Barnaby and defend your farm against invading robots.
You can try the game here:
The core of the game is the grid and turn based combat. During your turn, you can activate the abilities of various beans you collected. The king bean, for instance, is based on the king’s movement in chess and thus lets you move one tile in any direction. Using the bishop bean, you can move any distance diagonally (like the bishop in chess) and so on. Of course, there are beans that are not just copies of chess pieces: With the balisong bean, you can attack enemies two tiles in front of you (but without moving there).
There are also passive beans, that buff you or the abilities of your other beans. The bean of vitality gives you more health, the coffee bean grant you more energy (duh). The amplifier bean is perhaps my favorite one (and was a nightmare to code): it increases the range of all other beans by two tiles!
Once you used up all your energy (each active bean has an energy cost) it’s the robot’s turn. Each robot can move only once each turn, but watch out – they can move like the queen in chess. Luckily there are some tree trunks scattered around the map to hide.
The stage is cleared when you defeated all robots. Well done! After clearing a few stages on the Inscription inspired world map you will reach a treasure chest, where you get to choose one of three random beans to add to your arsenal for the next round.
The development
This game was the first project we did with the Godot game engine. Accordingly, we had to learn the engine (and the language GDScript) on the fly. Also – as it turned out, implementing a pseudo chess engine + enemy AI + modular upgrades is quite a lot.
To be quite honest, we bit off more than we could chew with this game. But that’s what a game jam (and making games in general) is about, right? Trying something and not worrying too much if it works out or not. That being said, I don’t consider this game a fail at all. I’m still loving the weird concept and the result is quite fun to play.
At one point we might pour in some last effort in balancing and polishing and put the bean game on our shelves where we gaze upon it proudly from time to time. If you want to try a more polished game jam game right away, you can take a look at Freestyler!
The About
Barnaby B. Brixton and His Bedazzling Bean Belt
Marcel Hasieber: programming, sounds
Max Punz: music, sound design
Martin Reder: programming, sounds
Florian Winkler: programming, art
Sebastian Winkler: programming
Software used:
Godot, Git, Photoshop, Abelton
Completed 2023
