From Pitch to Pancakes: How 'Bear and Breakfast' Blended Genres To Succeed

In this GDC 2023 talk, Rares Cinteza, Game Director at Gummy Cat Studio, analyzes how Bear and Breakfast, a management-adventure game, had its core design pillars revolve around blending genres with existing fanbases in order to carve out its own niche. He explores the challenges the team faced throughout the various stages of pitching, developing, marketing, and eventually launching a game that needed to satisfy expectations of each genre it tried to mix-while making the combination a compelling reason for publishers to like the pitch and for people to play the game.
GDC returns to San Francisco this March 18-22, 2024! For more information, be sure to visit our website and follow the #GDC2024 hashtag on social media.
Subscribe to the GDC newsletter and get regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or RSS.
Join the GDC mailing list: www.gdconf.com/subscribe
Follow GDC on Twitter: / official_gdc
GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

[@ilozen]

I think it's the best presentation I have ever seen in terms of: visuals (quality, simplicity, consistency), flow, ideas ("coming up") and those little 'cherry on top' things ("getting from A to bear"). Kudos to everyone who took part in it!

[@QuietPenguinGaming]

Awesome talk! Wish it had been an hour with questions.

[@danrowllet]

awesome game and a really clean and well-made presentatation! congrats!!!

[@richardbloemenkamp8532]

It looks like a really nice game after a day of hard work: cute characters, relaxed, a bit of building, a bit of management, close to home, less passive than a movie or a book.

[@TyrellzArt]

This was great to listen to, very well done! Thanks!

[@iamsecrets]

great talk!

[@leonardoraele]

0:11 Intro
5:32 Chapter 1 of 6. Mixing Genres?
7:56 Chapter 2 of 6. Adventure!
16:01 Chapter 3 of 6. Management
19:12 Chapter 4 of 6. Will it Blend?
22:35 Chapter 5 of 6. What worked?
25:12 Chapter 6 of 6. What didn't? / Mistakes

[@boohoo5419]

oh wow an actual usefull talk on GDC..

[@MiniGCJ23]

They bear si cool.

[@NattosoupStudio]

But that possum.

[@SojoTaku]

noice

[@zxcaaq]

bro.. you made a pedo bear game. the icon of the bear looks exactly like the pedobear, yikes.

[@olegushakov5074]

no it is not