After the downfall of the first Blêktre, I spent years experimenting with ideas that would eventually lead to the Blêktre 2081 I have today.
Bears in Underwear Simulator (2014)
I started a new project called Ours en Slip Simulator (Bears in Underwear Simulator).
It was still PHP and page-based, but this time it was more of an MMO/sandbox where players would open businesses and consume goods instead of fighting monsters.
Graphically, with its side-view screens in an open world, this one was more influenced by an old Andy Capp game, an old title where you had to survive in an open world by getting enough alcohol to stay alive and avoiding your wife, who would beat you if you crossed her path (a sexist game from a different era, but at least the wife was the boss there)
In my game though, you were just bears evolving to society after human extinction. The intro scene was a parody of Eve eating the apple, replaced by a bear discovering a credit card and discovering he was naked, so he put an underwear.
I was backed by a friend called Julien Molteni on the design this one, and the design wasn’t that bad but we did major mistakes though, as unexperienced game publishers :
- No prototypes were really made. It immediately got into production
- It was a multiplayer game and we didn’t think of the critical mass player base required to make the economy run
The result was a game that didn’t work well enough, and I gave up on it shortly after release, bitter about having put in so much work for so little return. It should have been a prototype, and I learned the lesson.
However, I didn’t know at the time that it wouldn’t be for nothing, as many elements from this game would carry over into Blêktre 2081 twelve years later.
Kapital (2017)
Kapital was a prototype I made to learn Unity and try a proper game engine for the first time. It was multiplayer again, built on a WebSocket Node.js server I had developed for other web experiments. My brother designed a low-poly character—a cat with a cigarette—and the idea was to create another MMO focused on business and capitalist monopolies, like Blêktre 2081.
The concept was designed to be playable solo if needed, within a world where players compete by running businesses, and NPCs act as consumers at their shops.
However, I kind of burned out on this one, with a scope that was probably too large. The two main challenges that became difficult to manage were, first, Unity not being well-suited for WebSocket integration at the time (or maybe I just wasn’t good enough to handle it properly back then), and second, the isometric graphics, which were a massive amount of work. On top of that, the open world used a chunk loading system that worked well but eventually drained too much of my energy. After a while, Unity started to feel a bit overkill for my needs, so I decided it was better to abandon that version.
Necro-Economics (2018)
A little incremental game I made after playing, of course, the masterpiece Universal Paperclips (play it if you didn’t yet). I added my usual twist: multiplayer. You played as someone selling a product, hiring low-cost workers, and sending trikes to your opponents.
It got unexpected attention on Reddit, broke my server while I was on a weekend at the beach, and I had to hotfix it on a very slow internet connection. That was fun. A playthrough just lasted around 3 or 4 hours, and people messaged me asking for more content, but I didn’t want to continue working on it—the concept was proven, but there wasn’t any specific challenge left to develop and didn’t want to just repeat the same thing again and again. And of course, this kind of game wouldn’t make money (I’m not willing to use the ad model).
However, the massive influx of players helped me solidify my custom Node.js multiplayer server, which I would go on to use for all my multiplayer projects afterward.
Since I didn’t continue to advertise the game, it eventually ended up empty, and I stopped maintaining the server after a while to minimize my overall costs.
Droguelike (2020)
This one was made during the COVID-19 lockdown, when we had plenty of time to experiment, and it marked a return to the web using the Phaser 3 framework.
It looked more like a regular colony-builder but, once again, included some MMO features. Like my Kapital prototype, it was an attempt to overcome the main issue in Bears in Underwear Simulator: the lack of a critical mass of consumers to make the economy work, so, this time, there were NPCs with needs who would shop at your businesses.
I don’t question the concept, because I had already been working on it and testing it for years. The execution, however, wasn’t so convincing. JavaScript is cool, and so is Phaser—I’m pretty used to both—but maybe it’s time to move on to another language and game engine. Most importantly, I should drop multiplayer where it’s not essential. I need to make a solid colony management game on my own before even thinking about multiplayer.
(I actually plan to rework on something like this one once I’m done with Blêktre 2081—this time as a solo experience, and using Godot)
At this point, althought the form was very different, at its core, this was the closest prototype to Blêktre 2081, which would later reuse the feature of NPCs acting as consumers in your businesses.