Beanbot Games
In 2016 my friend Jon and I launched Beanbot Games. Our mission was to create intuitive and fun mobile arcade games that captivated players with their simple, yet nuanced gameplay. We developed and published three games on Android and iOS between 2016 and 2018.
Splat Ball!
Splat Ball is a game of “keep-ups” with a twist – the ball is a paintbrush and the more it paints the screen, the harder it is to see. To change the color of the ball, the player must use it to hit falling paint swatches. However, in addition to these paint swatches there are also a wide range of “power ups”, some helpful and others not so much. To make things even more interesting, power-ups can be combined, constantly keeping the player on their toes.
Features
- Leaderboards and achievements integrated with Android and iOS game services
- Free and paid versions
- Interactive gameplay tutorial
- Advanced power-up combination system
- Hundreds of curated color palettes
- Custom soundtrack that intensifies with difficulty
Jump Drop!
Jump Drop is a fast-paced challenge where the player attempts to jump from column to column in an endless side-scrolling level. Touching and holding the screen causing the player to jump forward, but upon releasing the player quickly drops, making it increasingly difficult to nail your landings as the game pace increases. Score bonus points and charge up your “super jump” with perfect landings. Miss a landing and it’s game over.
Features
- Leaderboards and achievements integrated with Android and iOS game services
- Free and paid versions
- Infinite procedural side-scrolling level
- Custom soundtrack that intensifies with difficulty
Tamale Factory
Our debut game, Tamale Factory, is a silly physics game where the player attempts to catch as many falling tamales in their sombrero as possible. With a unique blend of true rigid-body physics and arcade-style gameplay, stacking tamales becomes surprisingly and satisfyingly difficult. With the right method, it’s theoretically possible to create an infinitely tall stack of tamales, but drop one and it’s game over!
Features
- Leaderboards and achievements integrated with Android and iOS game services
- Free and paid versions
- An entertaining launch screen where the character autonomously practices different strategies, doubling as a gameplay tutorial
- A clever blend of rigid-body physics and arcade-style physics
Greenbean Engine
We chose GameMaker: Studio as our game engine for its cross-platform functionality and ease-of-use. However, as powerful as GameMaker was, it lacked many features necessary for developing and publishing mobile games. As a result, we built a custom game engine inside of GameMaker that allowed us to quickly prototype and develop games, as well as reuse common functionality across projects. Some of its features included:
- A custom cross-platform user input system that made games playable on both mobile and desktop
- An advanced debugging mode for emulating touch devices and various screen resolutions, error logging and much more
- A pixel-perfect rendering system that ensured pixel-style games were pixel-perfect on all devices
- A custom state machine that built on GameMaker’s “room” functionality to manage game state
- A robust hierarchal UI system inspired by HTML and CSS, complete with responsive design, animations, asynchronous event handling and more
- An advanced music system that could arrange and stream custom music loops based on gameplay intensity
- An in-game advertisements system that could display both integrated Google Ads Services advertisements and custom marketing images for our free versions
- Integrated game services systems for leaderboards and achievements
Website
The website featured a responsive one-page design custom built with minimal HTML, CSS and Javascript. A PHP templating system made it easy to add new app pages and populate their gameplay videos, image galleries, SEO meta tags and more.
Brand
The logo came from the idea that Beanbot, the brand’s mascot, could rotate to display different emotions. We also liked that the design was reminiscent of a game die, and offered some fun opportunities for animation and interactivity.
Animated Splash Screen
To create a splash screen for our games I used Blender’s physics system to gently toss Beanbot onto a surface with a bit of random rotation. Once settled, I adjusted the camera and lights so that everything lined up perfectly in the final frame.
