How Bear and Breakfast Opened for Business Despite Multiple Challenges

ign.com:

The many independent developers I’ve spoken to over the years have described a wide array of diverse and unusual paths that brought them into game development in the first place. But Bear and Breakfast creator Rareș Cinteză is the first developer I’ve spoken to who not only didn’t imagine he’d ever be a game developer, but actively didn’t think he could be for the longest time.

“It felt like one of those ‘that’s for other people’ kind of things,” he tells me shortly ahead of Bear and Breakfast’s recent PC launch.

While Cinteză didn’t think he was cut out for the job, he still loved the idea of making games. So he started volunteering at conferences like GDC, doing graphic design for things like posters, and talking to developers. Eventually, this brought him to developer and publisher Those Awesome Guys, who brought him on board to do some marketing…which gradually turned into game development. Cinteză had made it.

Once he had his feet wet in development, though, Cinteză wanted to take it a step further and make his own game, and thus Bear and Breakfast was born. It’s Cinteză’s first “real game dev project” from start to finish, as well as the first major project for most of the other team members at Gummy Cat studio. Cinteză says he learned Unity while working on B&B.

Bear and Breakfast originated with the pun in the name, and the overall concept was born from Cinteză’s love of management sims like Theme Hospital. The initial plan, Cinteză says, was to have the bear eat the guests - making them the “breakfast” of Bear and Breakfast. But funny as this was, when it didn’t complement the management playstyle, they opted to make something a bit more cozy.

Thus the Bear and Breakfast I’ve been playing for the last week is a far