IB: Bean Man: The Movie: The Game

IB: Bean Man: The Movie: The Game, is a short point and click game. I made in GameMaker Studio.

I made it as a personal project specifically for my youngest sibling Issy. It was actually their Christmas gift. Imagine their joy as they descended down the stairs on Christmas morning to find it wrapped underneath the tree.

I didn’t give Santa the credit either. Scumbag

The Process

Every year, my family will do a Secret Santa Christmas swap. A couple of years ago, someone had the idea that all the gifts should be homemade. The stakes instantly went through the roof.

For Christmas of 2024, I pulled Issy, my youngest sibling. We call Issy “Ib” because we think it is a funny name. It is also really fun to say, you should do so now.

Did you do it? Good. Ib doesn't really play video games, but they do enjoy the Rusted Lake “Cube Escape” point and click series. I figured this was the perfect chance to both dust off my coding skills, and make Ib something personal and fun.

The mechanics of a point and click game are quite simple, so once I got into engine, things moved pretty quickly. I did run into one bug in the second area where the inventory would only save if the player had been to every room first.

I slammed my head against this problem for a while. When I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to instead design the rooms to be accessible by one side only. Instead of flipping back and forth between the rooms, you had to go all the way around. There were only four rooms, so it still felt pretty seamless. I thought this was a creative way to fix my problem.

I started by playing all the Rusty Lake games to get a better feel for them, Then, I designed Ib’s game. I wrote out each room, the items that would be needed, and their specific puzzles/interactions.

Next, I drew out each room in PhotoShop so I could easily replicate things in engine. I would love to display those original designs but my Adobe license expired and I can’t access any of the work I did in those softwares. Always export folks.

I am not much of an artist, so I relied on free assets from itch and other sites of the like. I also thought it would be funny to lean into a low resolution janky artstyle. So, everything is a little mismatched and chaotic.

Lessons Learned

Making Ib’s game was a great lesson in making things work within a set timeframe. Although the deadline wasn’t being enforced by stakeholders, it is hard to give a Christmas gift post Christmas. I had to squash bugs quickly and iterate on the ones I couldn’t squish.

Overall, I felt that this game was my cleanest design process from start to finish. I had exactly what I wanted down on paper and made very few design decisions in engine. Doing this gave me the breathing room to take on coding challenges when they arose.

I am really proud of how the game turned out. I think it is full of personality and quite charming to click through.