BARPG began as an homage to Agent 47, centering around a simple gameplay loop of casual drinkmaking, identifying a target, and poisoning their drink before making a quick getaway through various stealth platforming levels. Upon prototyping these two core mechanics, it stood out to me how unexpectedly fun the bartending aspect was. It was so fun in fact, that the platforming idea I had planned for the second half of the gameplay loop seemed bland by comparison. The game showed me where the fun was, and I listened. I scrapped the platforming element in favor of leaning fully into crafting a bartending game. Pouring drinks in a basic fluid simulation I had baked up with Godot with a tight, responsive, and challenging scoring system became the beating heart of BARPG. 

I wanted players to feel like they were a part of the story in multiple ways. To accomplish this, I added an extensive player customization system, ways to decorate the workplace, and finally a branching narrative. This all lended to this project's firm roots as a role-playing game centering around life as a bartender.

The art direction for BARPG was clear to me from the start; keep it simple, consistent, and make it vibrant. I wanted this game to be something that was fun to look at, for extended play sessions or for a brief trailer. Vibrant pixel art was the solution to this, but there was a problem: I am not trained in 2D art. I have experience designing 3D environment art in Blender, but not working in 2D space and specifically not in pixel art. Despite this, I utilized digital drawing software at low resolutions to trace a prototype bar interior. The style was just too good to pass up, so I adapted. As the game's scope widened, I needed to make more environments and tracing reference images for scenes I had dreamed up in my mind proved impossible. I began crafting a pipeline through which I could model/render a scene in 3D using Blender, then through creative downsampling and reduction of color space, output an image that resolves as pixel art. This blew my creativity wide open. I could create animated backgrounds, use creative lighting tricks, and most importantly, create consistent art assets quickly.

The only thing in this project that I knew I would be outsourcing is the game's music. The time it would take me to create pieces would simply be outside the scope of my development cycle. On top of this, I wanted the player to be able to express themself through the music playing in the bar. I spent time reaching out to music artists I knew personally for the use of their music in the game, pulling from an assortment of genres to give players choice. Supplementing this variety in music was a UI system that rolls song titles and artist names on the screen similar to an MTV-era music video. 

Outside of music, all sound design was recorded, mixed, and implemented by myself. Inside of a homemade foley stage, I recorded countless bottle clinks, glugs, footsteps, pencil scratches, typing sounds, beeps, and more. A select few of these were chosen to make it in the final project, and creative uses of pitch-shifting add even more variety. Two I would like to highlight are the sounds of liquid pouring and characters speaking. 

Liquid pouring is actually a set of 3 'pop' noises I made into a microphone with my lips. The noises are randomly selected, one after another, pitch-shifted within a range that slides up in frequency linearly with the current volume of the glass. This creates a convincing effect that the sound dynamically changes as liquid splashes in a glass that is filling up.

Characters speaking are also created from a series of sounds I made into a mic. This time, they were monosyllabic vowel noises, pitched around for variety and played as the dialogue lines are typed out to the speech bubbles.

To create visibility for BARPG, I knew from the start that Steam would be the game's destination, and social medias would be the primary form of directing traffic to the platform. Steam would allow the most players to be able to access the game natively, rather than requiring a downloadable file through hosting websites like itch.io. Though, in order to create effective marketting, I needed to have consistent brand identity. With the art direction of the game finalized, I was able to utilize similar techniques to create assets like logos, title cards, thumbnails, etc. These all centered around a rainbow silhouette of the player character, vague enough to leave room for audiences to see themself, but recognizable to leave a lasting impression and serve the artisticle goal of vibrancy. The trailer came organically after sourcing some of the musical artists. One song called Lilly by Xochitl stuck out to me with its punchy, four-on-the-floor driving beat. This song, along with inspiration from Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noe's title sequences, provided the basic beats for the game's first trailer. This trailer demonstrated the extensive player customization and drink mechanics, crediting music contributors, before surprise announcing the demo released that day on Steam. I did a rollout for this trailer on Instagram reels, Youtube, and Tiktok, using data from the performance of each to inform future directions for the final marketting sprint as I finalize production. The demo was featured during Steam Next Fest during Oct  14 - Oct  21 2024.