All Hams on Deck!
During the development of Vacation Simulator, I was feeling burnt out on making VR games. In order to flex some creative muscle, I began making small prototypes. One of my prototypes was proving fun, and I thought it might be fun to have my own game running on my phone. That decision led to many others, including founding a company with friends, shipping the game, writing and directing our own trailer, and wearing the game at PAX South 2020.
The premise is simple: you control a boat, and must Bounce That Ham for as long as possible. The pig colliding with any object, including the boat, counts for a single point. The goal was to make a one-button game that could be played while I was waiting in line, which also meant short play sessions. I opted for a simple way to make play sessions short, and that was to make the game hard.
I built a system that scaled difficulty over time, and created scriptable objects that stored volleys that the Boarviathan would fire to sink the pig. As time passed, the difficulty of the volleys would increase, eventually making obstacles relentless.
When it came time to release the game, we also realized we had no money for a booth, and no publisher to offer us space at one. It was also a passion project, so we figured spending the requisite thousands on a booth for a game we knew was not going to be a smash-hit was a lost cause. Instead, we opted to build an arcade cabinet backpack and simply enjoy PAX in the form of a functional cosplay.
We dissolved the Bread & Butter Game Co. in 2023 after not making anything else, but we had a fantastic time making the game and taking a very DIY approach to all of our marketing and content creation. We also had a custom build of the game for PAX, creating a custom leaderboard for the convention and allowing folks to enter their names. While the company is defunct and the game has lapsed on iOS and Android, it is still playable on PC for free.