Bear Ferry Simulator

dzejpi 2021-10-04 06:48

Pretty fun little game! Took me a little while to understand that I cannot put bears into the boat unless it is all the way into the right - it could be more forgiving. And took me a while to understand that I cannot just put all bears into it.

I loved bear faces - I felt a little bad when one of them drowned. However, I was not able to sink the boat. It always stayed on the water-level even when I kept it there for a long time. What do you have to do to do that?

I found one gamebreaking bug though - if you close the game on Itch.io and then open it again, it will render like this. But don’t feel bad about that, I work as QA and it is my job to find out how to break everything I look at. :)

Screenshot 2021-10-04 at 8.39.44.png

guntrip 2021-10-04 06:57

Thanks @DzejPi, and that's a weird one! I'll see if I can figure out what's causing that.

guntrip 2021-10-04 07:05

Oh and the boat will sink when it's unbalanced, you can usually do that by putting a fat bear on the very edge. It will then take on water and sink, the bear will die, and the boat will float back to the surface.

I intended to add something to alert that the boat needed to be right against the shore but ran out of time! :(

dzejpi 2021-10-04 07:14

@guntrip thank you for the reply! I will try that. And I definitely understand running out of time; I think we all do. :)

liam 2021-10-04 09:30

Fun little game, thanks for making it! Ran into a few problems where I couldn't click bears but they eventually resolves themsolves. Nice atmosphere from the bgmusic and great concept!

gimbalock 2021-10-04 09:33

Great job for your first game! You even managed to animate the bears moving and drowning, well done. I found the controls fairly easy to grasp, though I would have liked the bears to be drag and drop instead of clicking, would have been move intuitive. Great job on your first game, keep it up!

guntrip 2021-10-04 09:36

Thank you @liam! I think more click-feedback would have been an improvement, there's a few times when you're blocked but don't know why.

And thank you @gimbalock! Drag and drop would have been a nice addition (and annoyingly, I can totally think how to implement it in a few lines lol!)

Thank you both for the feedback :heart:

2021-10-04 12:40

Cute game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 49 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/d0CZearFG8U

guntrip 2021-10-04 12:43

Thanks @jupiter-hadley, that's so cool! I'm really excited that folks are playing it, so it's extra exciting to actually see a recording!

goldenevolution 2021-10-04 12:53

Great concept! Simple game making great use of the theme. Definitely a fun little game!

bloodbane 2021-10-04 14:08

The boat is really unstable, I accidentally send the boat without any bear in it. Of course, I sent the boat back to carry the bears. Laughs aside, it gets kinda repetitive as it seems only one or two bears can be in the boat at a time.

guntrip 2021-10-04 14:24

@bloodbane Thanks for the feedback! You're right, it's a bit too easy to send the boat away when it is empty. The bear weights/sizes are random, so there's a chance you'll get several medium-size bears in a row and only be able to fit in two at a time. I think with more time I'd made that less random and introduce increasing difficulty!

2021-10-04 15:45

nice you finished a game that's an achievement for itself.

click sounds and sound effects of walking jumping in out and boat will add more. very good logic.

guntrip 2021-10-04 16:17

Thanks @yodda! I totally agree, I think my lesson learnt for next time is to allow more time for audio. The bears deserve some cute noises as they walk about!

chesschaser 2021-10-04 19:31

Fun little game. Love the concept!

bentebent 2021-10-04 21:51

I think this is very well done, it's satisfying trying to balance the bears as good as possible then watch them scoot over the water. Nicely done!

samdemaine 2021-10-04 22:07

Nice game, really enjoyed it, art was pretty decent and gameplay was really fun. Good idea, Good execution!

derek-volker 2021-10-04 22:58

I ferried 30 bears only putting one bear at a time and found no prejudice in letting them go alone, beign large or tiny.

The concept is neat, but i guess it lacks something. The higher waves didn't seem to affect the boat enought to make the boat sink (or didn't i play enough?)

Anyway, i found the graphics nice and the "evolving" music a nice addition to the game. Also, didn't know you could get a bear ferry license! Good one.

Nice job developing this game!

michael-faragher 2021-10-04 23:48

The UI could be a little more reactive so I know if a click is ignored or if I'm in the wrong place. Love the graphics.

shootboots 2021-10-04 23:52

Ok so I have a few pieces of feedback you might want to hear, but first of all, an amazingly done game for only 48 hours, I especially liked the water simulation and the bears countenances. However, I felt the game wasnt challenging enough because I could simply place singular bears every time. The benign music was really great, and loved how it changed over time. Great!

funemaker 2021-10-05 03:34

Nice job...the bear face expressions were a nice touch. I felt really bad when I drowned some of them. Maybe it could ultimately use a way to finish (or maybe I didn't get there), and also, you can just put 1 bear in each boat and avoid any challenge so I found myself wanting there to be an incentive to get more in the boat (like a time limit for a score or something?) In any case, good work.

rustywolf 2021-10-05 04:13

I really love the idea. Not sure why you need to click the boat multiple times? Feels like it just makes it a bit clunky. Also struggled to get the bear to d2rop a lot of the time.

I think going hard into the physics aspect of it and letting the user drops bears anywhere and see how they land would have made this one of the best entries. A jenga pile of bears trying to cross the river would've been hilarious

Solid entry, good execution of a good idea

poovi 2021-10-05 05:19

Such a cute and simple game to play.. and the music is quite meditative... I found a small bug though.. couldnt drag and drop the bear on to the boat.. the bear gets stuck to the mouse pointer.. i had to kill a bear by dropping it in the water to move the boat.. :)

guntrip 2021-10-05 07:51

Thanks for the feedback @derek-volker, @shootboots , @funemaker! I agree and would have liked to make the difficulty increase. Currently the more boat crossings you make, regardless of number of bears, the higher the waves get. The idea was that if you were more efficient with your bear placement, you could get more bears across before it got harder. But as you noticed, the higher waves don't add that much of a challenge (they just increase the chance of it sinking due to the angle). I think with more time, I could have tweaked that, but I'd also have liked to make the size of the bears in the queue part of the difficulty curve too! I might come back for that afterwards! :)

@michael-faragher Thanks! I've noticed that too, there are a few times when the game will "refuse" a click for whatever reason and it really isn't clear.

@rustywolf Thanks!! I quite liked having to "push" the boat along but perhaps a boat-pilot or opening a sail would have been less clicky! I did try and figure out how to stack the bears, jenga style, as I agree that would have been hilarious. It was too much for the time we had and my JavaScript physics skills unfortunately :D

@poovi Thank you! That's intentional - for now at least, I'll add dragging and dropping once the rating is over and we can make changes. I agree that would have been better! :)

nshbae 2021-10-05 10:29

Great example of easy to learn hard to master! How about other animals or special bears like sheeps, horses or arctic bears?

guntrip 2021-10-05 10:40

@nshbae Ha! I was just watching JUSTCAMH play it on Twitch and he initially thought it was the game with the fox and chickens. Maybe everyone could start eating each other!

mikoziq 2021-10-05 16:12

After ferrying a lot of plushy bois

Pros:

- The bears are super cute - Easy to grasp mechanic - Good gameplay loop - Ferrying bears feels somewhat satisfying - Actually quite good pchysics of the boat

Cons:

- I wish the music was a bit more... cheerful? - A bit lacking in the other graphics department

Good effort and good job!

justcamh 2021-10-05 16:14

Hey matey, thanks for submitting the game to the stream, it was a good time! Here's the vod if you'd like to rewatch; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1167974254

guntrip 2021-10-05 16:40

Thanks @mikoziq! I definetly wanted more bleepy cheerful music but I got carried away with what you heard and then ran out of time :laughing:

@justcamh Thanks so much! I loved watching you play - a lot of the buggyness you found was the lack of feedback when the game refuses a mouse click. Something definitely to address later! And I still don't understand why there's an occasionally very dense bear. The stream was great, I kept it on for the next few hours while I worked :smile_cat:

jka 2021-10-08 15:35

Nice job! I especially like how the bears look, very cute! :smiley:

wuppos 2021-10-09 13:29

Although I liked the relaxing style of this game, I thought it became a bit repetitive after a while. There are not too much choices you can make. As far as I tried, I could only really fit two bears in the boat at once (maybe three if they are small), and each time I could just put one bear on the right and one on the left. Then ferry the boat, wait for the bears to get off, bring the boat back, and repeat the process. After a while the waves started to become much stronger, but I actually found that this did not affect the gameplay much. I believe it might help this game if there were more interesting choices to make. Maybe you can stack bears on top of each other? Or having the weather fluctuate, so you can choose to wait for a storm to pass before ferrying? I dont have any more ideas, but stuff like this to have a bit more to think about while playing :) (Of course this is just my opinion though! ^_^)

I must say that I really liked playing it for the first few minuted. It worked reasonably well, and it was immediately clear what the goal was. The relaxing gameplay was also nice after playing all these other 'unstable' games, haha. The bear sprites were really cute, and I think the music was fitting as well ^_^ All-in-all really well done! I enjoyed it :D

tatu-heinamaki 2021-10-10 10:49

Loved the cute bears and the relaxing music! I played until I got 55 bears across, with two casualties. Sometimes the bears bugged out and a few were left hanging in the air and a few were just unclickable on the shore. Otherwise everything went well. By the end the waves had grown into tidal heights and the boat was shaking a lot, but all the bears managed to stay onboard. I would have liked a more clearer indication on if there's room on the boat or not, now I just had to try and sometimes the bears jumped out and got bugged in the air. Here the bears are going to hibernation right now, so this is a very topical and fun interpretation of the theme!

erkberg 2021-10-11 13:48

Very nice game! It made it into the fourth part of my let's-play-series: https://youtu.be/7aO0Tm7Tgyw

guntrip 2021-10-12 15:53

Thanks so much @erkberg! It was great fun watching you play the game. I agree that stacking the bears would have been much more fun but I couldn't find a way to do that in the time I had!