Looking Back Before Moving Forward

24 July, 2015Leave a comment

Tytte Bear was released a little over a month ago. Since then I have been taking some time off to reflect upon what has been accomplished and what the next step will be. I have arrived at some conclusions and made a few decisions. Now I will share them with you.

My first conclusion is that Tytte Bear is a success. Investors, economists and pretty much any normal entrepreneur with the intent on making money would probably not agree on that. And they would be right given the result of expenses versus income. But I am not an entrepreneur. I am just a guy who wanted to make a game. Making money would certainly be nice but it was never the main goal.

My goals was to finish the project within six months, do it on a minimum budget and avoid putting in crazy overtime hours. Scoping the project was the biggest challenge because of three reasons. First, I have never started a company before. Second, I had never finished and released a game before. Third, I would have to do everything myself. True, I had Hanna who did all the graphics, for which I am truly grateful. But everything besides that (game design, code, audio, economy, website and marketing among else) would be on my desk.

I did manage complete above goals . For that reason I deem Tytte Bear a success. Off course, everything did not turn out perfect and there were features cut out. For example there were plans for more enemies and more levels. But those would have required either delaying the game, crazy over time or hire people. The first two options would take too much time and I would probably become miserable in the process. The last one was never really an option since I could not afford it.

The game has also received very few downloads and the reason is simple. I spent too little time on marketing. It is a full time job. But marketing is not my strong side nor an area I am keen to spend my time on. I rather write code. I could give the excuse that my invisible game is because of a crowded app market but I see that as a lame excuse. More or less every business is crowded. Walk into any store and there are tons of products competing for the customers attention. If people can not see me outside the store, why would they see me inside the store?

In my personal opinion Giron Games have been a major success since I have a game released and learned a lot doing it. Alas, it is a business and in that regard it is a major fiasco. Thus I have have decided to let the company die. But do not be sad. It is more of a reorganization than a shutdown. This site will still continue but it will be as a site for personal hobby projects. Tytte Bear will continue to be available on Google Play. In fact, version 1.1 released a few days ago. In it, all ads have been disabled and removed! This autumn I will pick up my university studies again and it will take most of my time. Though I have started to tinker with a new project. The image below might have something to do with it.

Cheers,
Andreas Mikko, founder of Giron Games

Tytte Bear Is Released!

19 June, 201519 June, 2015Leave a comment

Tytte Bear is now out on Google Play! How much does it cost? Nothing! Download it for free and enjoy its winter wonderland this Midsummer’s Eve!

Just click this button to go directly to the store:

Then And Now

18 June, 201518 June, 2015Leave a comment

Tytte Bear will be released tomorrow! So let us take look in the rear view mirror.

Back in November 2014 I fooled around in the Unity game engine in order to prepare lectures. Though the focus was to create good lectures, those preparations also resulted in a prototype of what eventually would become Tytte Bear. At this point, development consisted of a few hours a week but by the end of January 2015 there existed a functioning prototype. The prototype consisted of a player avatar, a door, a switch, a simple enemy and graphics made with MS Paint or borrowed from the internet.

Early Prototype

Proper development started in February 2015. This is when we started thinking about things like art style, story, level design, menus and introducing feed-back so the player actually knows what is happening. By the time March came around, the game had come to a stage were it began to resemble the final product.

Tytte Bear In March 2015

A lot of work remained. The enemies had no animations, doors and switches consisted of red boxes and there was no sound! Also missing were the berries you collect, level select, save functionality and a lot more. All of which have been added in the past months and have taken us to were we are today!

Tytte Bear Final

Add Clever Pun Here

16 June, 201516 June, 2015Leave a comment

Maybe you are wondering what “Tytte Bear” actually means and why the game is called that? Well, it is tightly connected with the evolution the main character Tytte. In the beginning there really was no name. The game was referred to as “Stealth 2D” or “Project Stealth”. The character was called Punchy since the placeholder graphic were a black blob that interacted with things by punching on them.

Punchy’s spritesheet

When more proper graphics were added I started thinking about an appropriate name for the character that could also serve as the game’s title. I found none. It was not until weeks later, when we added collectibles to the game in the form of lingonberries, that I had the idea to look up the word “lingonberry” in different languages. Mainly because the berry is red like Tytte’s coat. Turns out in Norwegian and Danish they are called “tyttebær”. Though the pun might be obvious to you now it was not for me. I just picked out “Tytte” since it is a rare girl’s name in Sweden. I then tried out different subtitles. Most related to lemmings and other small rodents because that was the inspiration for Tytte’s design. But none of the subtitles sounded any good.

One day I was listening to the theme song from Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears. Yes, it happens sometimes. In that moment it struck me that “bear” and “bær” is written and pronounced pretty much the same. The difference being the English word referring to an animal and the Norse word to tiny fruits. Also, our small “rodent” kind of looked like a tiny bear. For this reason the name and title became “Tytte Bear”, a pun on “Lingonberry” and “Lingon Bear”.

From Zombie Trolls To Wolverines

10 June, 2015Leave a comment

The development of the main character was pretty straightforward since we early on knew what kind of animal it should be. This was not the case with the enemies that patrol the levels. In early prototypes the enemies were represented with a happy smiley-face.

Obviously a smiley isn’t very threatening so the placeholder had to go. The initial idea was to use John Bauer-like trolls. The concept process went from horrifying zombie trolls, to some less zombiefied trolls and finally scrapping the trolls in favor for wolverines. At one point we also played with the idea of the enemies carrying objects like lanterns. The lanterns were scrapped but you can see some lantern (and stick) sketches in the concept art below.

Tytte’s appearance

4 June, 20154 June, 2015Leave a comment

From day one it was the decided that Tytte Bear would feature a subarctic theme. Therefore the characters should be based on the wildlife in those regions. For the player’s avatar we needed a small creature to fit within the non-combat based gameplay. The artist were given the highly detailed instruction “Give me a Norwegian lemming or something” and she started drawing. Below are some of the concept art she delivered.

We finally ended up with this design:

The Non-Violent Stealth Game

2 June, 20152 June, 2015Leave a comment

This is the story about the ambition with Tytte Bear, why Tytte carries a stick and how it all ties to Solid Snake.

I’m a big fan of Metal Gear Solid. No, not the one for PlayStation. Though it’s pretty good too. I’m talking about Metal Gear Solid for the Game Boy Color, also known as Metal Gear: Ghost Babel in some parts of the world. Being on the GBC the graphics were quite limited. The protagonist, Solid Snake, looked like a gray, pixelated rice corn. On the other hand, lacking graphical horsepower it made the game focus more on actual gameplay rather than endless cut scenes and that is a good thing in my opinion.

Now, what does a coarse super-spy have to do with a cuddly, berry collecting, furr ball? Well, I wanted Tytte Bear to have the same general concept as Metal Gear: A two-dimensional stealth game with a bird’s eye-view. Though I also wanted the game to be suitable for children, thus Solid Snake’s habit to punch (or shoot) every problem in the face wasn’t going to cut it. This stealth game was going to be non-violent.

Thinking up a non-violent stealth game isn’t easy. Violence is a common element in the genre. Throw it out and you need to replace it with something else. Preferably something that enhances the “stealth”. Our first decision was to make the protagonist, Tytte, a small animal and the enemies predators. Which provides a reasonable explanation to why you can’t fight them. Though, we still wanted Tytte to interact with the enemies in in some way. Therefor we equipped her with a magic wand that could temporarily freeze enemies. This resulted in two problems. First of, it was too effective! You could freeze enemies over and over and they couldn’t do anything. Secondly, it was kind of boring with this block of frozen beast blocking the way. Then we remembered the old prank were you tap someones shoulder and as they turn around you walk past them on the opposite side. We tried this by turning the wand into a regular stick. Which was easy since it kind of was a stick anyway. By poking an enemy with the stick, the beast will turn towards you, giving you an opportunity to sneak past. But it also introduces a risk factor since you might be spotted if you’re to slow. The screenshots below shows it in action.

The stick also opened up some other possibilities but we’ll take that another day.

Sneak up behind

*Poke*

Sneak around

Made it!