Kuma Story

his is a tale of a man from Canada in Japan, and a woman in Korea, and their love for one another. Honestly, I'm not all that great with choosing gifts for people, and had a very colored idea of gift-giving over the many years of my childhood. I always have the ideal that something 'from the heart', handmade is the way to go with gifts. Before my SO and I became an item, I had tried at least twice to do a portrait of her from photographs, usually to no avail.

I don't suppose that the images were bad by any right, but they just didn't feel good enough to give as a gift. This year, on our 3rd dating anniversary, I took the culmination of my years of experience doing indies game development with AGS and created what I equate to an interactive greeting card. The end result was a small game called Kuma Story that I am moderately satisfied with.

I made a conscious decision to make the game as user-friendly and minimalist as humanly possible. In a way, this was a very difficult exercise as in adventure gaming, we are used to having a whole plethora of commands at our fingertips for immersive purposes. But in order to make sure that a non-gamer could appreciate the controls, I limited them to the simplest possible: left click to walk, right click to interact.

I also imposed on myself the limitation to make a game that has no (relevant) text. Ultimately, when the game itself is finished, aside from the credits there should be no speech, no text - it should be internationally friendly insofar as anyone should be able to play the game without understanding the language it was written in. In a manner of speaking, I got this idea because the woman it is dedicated to is of a different culture, and has a different native language than I do.

The choice to have the credits in Japanese were for this very same reason. It's a neutral language for the two of us. Incidentally, it is also being used as a portfolio piece, so it helps to have what little language is in the game accessible to the people who will be critically reviewing it the most.

And so here we have it: Kuma story. The (hopefully touching) story of a young teddy bear in love with another teddy bear, and trying to find a way to express it to her. The demo itself is very short and contains only a fraction of what will eventually be in the game, but it's a taste of what I believe may eventually be a good little piece of work, and an ongoing present to the woman I love.