Unfortunately Covid19 is making it impossible for the entire family to get together in real life and celebrate Bie's birthday milestone, but thanks to technology we can at least do it virtually.
If you ask Bie about that meeting, it is difficult for her to fully grasp how the times have changed. Who could blame her? From growing up in the Brukel farmhouse without even electricity, to hanging out with the entire family online; the times have changed in ways that she could never have foreseen back then.
However, perhaps the biggest surprise of them all is the existence of this game. Who would have imagined that people in 2020 would be able to go back to her childhood home and experience her memories again? Certainly not Bie. She always felt her life to be rather "mundane and uninteresting", as she has told us many times. She always wanted to be a teacher, but she never had the chance to get an education. There was always work to be done at the farm; clothes to be washed, mouths to be fed.
That is why Brukel is so important to me as her grandson and the designer of the game. While Bie might not have gotten in front of a classroom herself, she is able to teach virtually every time someone plays Brukel. I am therefore incredibly grateful to everyone who supports this game and joins "Bie's classroom" by doing so. I would like to thank you all through this online birthday event:
If you already own the game, you can find a special easter egg (as long as you computer's date is set to 11-29) in the Stories From The Front chapter. (It will be there every year on this day.)
If you don't own the game, you can pick it up at a discounted rate as the game is on sale. (I wish I could have made it -95% but unfortunately -90% is the maximum Steam allowed for.)
Finally, if you'd like to wish Bie a happy birthday, please leave her a message on Twitter or Instagram at @brukelgame. I will deliver all messages to her.
Thank you all!
Bob
IndieCade Sale and Update 1.0.9
Brukel is nominated for the IndieCade Awards and what better way to celebrate this than with a sale and an update?
I've addressed some of the issues that were reported in the Steam discussion and other places.
Changes Made
Running is now available throughout the entire game (unless you are crouching).
The cellphone view now closes when you open the settings menu. There was a conflict that occurred sometimes when both were open at the same time.
A tutorial message about turning on light switches will appear if you do not use any light switches before it gets dark in chapter 1.
The panel in front of the corner cabinet in the fancy room during chapter 1 does not interfere with detection of the corner cabinet anymore.
A "sensitivity" option was added to the settings menu that adjusts the sensitivity of both the mouse and the analogue stick that is assigned to looking for your gamepad.
The time to move 100 Unreal units before you get hurt in the battlefield has been increased from 2~3 seconds to 3~4 seconds. This gives you some extra time to get to the stable.
The player needs to move further away from where Bertha will spawn in the dark stable for her to spawn. I could not replicate the issue that a few people voiced about them being able to sneak past Bertha before they are supposed to, but this will make doing so at least a little more difficult.
A bug concerning the Haunting Picture achievement in Steam has been fixed. You can no longer trigger the achievement during chapter 1.
Have fun with the new and improved version of Brukel and please let me know in the Steam discussion if you find more issues:
After launching this morning, Brukel just got its first patch.
The patch fixes the Photographer Steam achievement. To get this achievement, you need to take a picture of every object that has a meaningful story of my grandmother attached to it (and one special object that I regret not having a story for since she never mentioned it).
In the previous version, one object did not register for the achievement so you would get stuck at 98%. Now you can get to 100% again and get the achievement.
Good luck achievement hunting!
The first review is in!
It is always scary to send out your work to a third party for review, especially if you are a part-time solo indie game developer that has worked the last 5 years on a game about your grandmother's legacy. While I have worked on a lot of games in my past, Brukel marks the first time that I programmed a 3D game by myself, so I am not very confident about my work, especially considering the quality of other games out there.
Seriously. There are so many amazing games out there! In fact, I had to force myself to stop playing games similar to Brukel altogether, just for my mental health. When you are grinding through every little bug and every silly issue that exists in your own game, it is simply not healthy to see how good the competition for it is.
So when my students raved about Layers of Fear and how they are doing things similar to what I am doing in Brukel... That sure sounds lovely, but I didn't play it.
Then Attentat 1942 won an award at Games For Change with a concept similar to Brukel but with actors instead of actual survivors... Fascinating. but yeah... Didn't play it.
How about when my friend and fellow professor/solo developer Dave Beck released Tombeaux... Surely I did play... Nope. I bought it to support him, but didn't play it.
Over the last 5 years, I bought tons of games like Brukel to support the developers -as I know what they went through to make it- but I did not play them. Until last weekend.
Last weekend, I finally conjured up the courage to try one of the games like Brukel that I had sitting in my Steam library, promising myself that I would muster up the strength to finish Brukel even if it would just fall utterly short in comparison to the game I was going to play.
Fortunately, Brukel held up well. Even if my game was a little less polished, I walked away feeling good about Brukel, feeling that I did the very best that I could with it: an emotional experience that is definitely on par with what I saw from the competition.
Which was quite the relief, but obviously, I am biased. Even if the playtests went well, even if the exhibits went well. What will the critics say? What will the Internet say?
I guess at this point it is clear why I wanted to write a far too long post about getting my first positive review for the game. It will always something that I cherish, so thanks so much to the Indie Hive for their kind words, and especially this line:
Hearing Bie’s voice throughout and being able to connect the scenarios to real people, conjures strong feelings of empathy for those that experience the terrible violence of war, whilst reminding the player that they will (probably) never fully understand.
Brukel has never been about profit to me. In fact, the money it raises will go to porting the game to other platforms and/or making another game that brings someone's life history back to life. Instead, Brukel is about making people feel the world through someone else's eyes, through someone else's experiences. That the game managed to do that for at least one person so far, makes it all worth it.
