bean to me!
projects | | linkz: Steam Page
Skills Practiced: C#, Game Design, Steamworks API
Tools Used: Lutra
Project Duration: 6 Months
Project Focus: Fun, Full Game Development
Bean to Me is a game I’ve been working on since April 2024. After becoming a freelance developer, I found myself with more free time than I had before. I was idly doodling on my whiteboard when I thought about making a weird and wacky version of Mancala, the ancient board game - and the ideas just grew and grew and eventually became Bean to Me!
The core concept of the game is, like Mancala, about sowing and collecting beans. Each player has a dimpled wooden board, and beans are distributed amongst the dimples. Each player takes it in turns to pick up a pile of beans, drop them one at a time in an anti-clockwise direction around the board, and attempt to amass beans in the big pot at one end of the board.
There are hundreds of variations of Mancala across the globe; Bean to Me’s contribution here is that there are a bunch of special beans that each player can bring with them into a game. The special beans alter the rules and flow of the game - doing things like moving extra spaces, switching places with eachother, preventing themselves from being stolen, and so on!
At the time of writing, there are over 60 different types of beans in the game and honestly, it’s sometimes hard to resist adding even more when an idea bubbles up out of the blue. It’s really made me stretch my design muscles, coming up with lots of unique mechanics and trying to balance them against eachother. I’ll probably write a bigger post in the devlog about how the game’s opponents work, too!
One of my primary goals with Bean to Me was to prove to myself that I could, given the time, sit down and make a game from start to finish, with a tight scope and focused design principles, and hit a deadline that I set myself - since historically, I’ve found it difficult to do all of those things together in the same project.
Over time, it started to make sense that while we were founding Very Evil Demons that I could take the opportunity to publish the game under the brand; that way, we could get ourselves registered as a developer on the Steam platform, and have a business entity for all of that to go through, instead of having to set something up inside my own house.
In addition, I also wanted to understand the full publishing process for Steam; I was familiar with parts of it, but I had never sat myself down and done everything start-to-finish. There’s quite a lot of art to make for the Store pages, Achievements, icons, and so on, but I found the process fun and rewarding!
If the game sounds like something you might enjoy, please do check it out! There’ll be a free demo up by October!
Additional Credits:
- Emmy Leadley - She did the awesome music and a bunch of Lutra’s engine code!
- Very Evil Demons - Help, advice, testing, logo art, and more!
