Hey, everyone! Your friendly bean-obsessed demon Jordan here! With the successful launch of Bean to Me last month, I thought it was time for a little look back over its development - and unveil some secrets about its history and possible plans for the future!

The Beginning of Beans

Bean to Me began life as a project within a project. A few years back, I was working on a game called Tiny Melon Friend’s Big Melon Adventure; a sidescrolling platformer where the player took control of a character born out of a markov-chain bot that regurgitated my tweets called Tiny Melon Friend. They kind of became a mascot character of mine, so I started building a great big platforming game with them as the main star. The project is still in hibernation, but Emmy helped me make a demo back in 2021 that you can check out on my personal site if you like!
In that game, the primary collectible used to unlock new levels are, well - beans. Different types of beans too, with regular beans, silver beans, and gold beans up for grabs as a means to incentivize players to play with tiny melon friend’s moveset. But why beans? What’s with my chronic and sustained bean mania? Well, one of tiny melon friend’s frequent refrains as a twitter bot was “Cracking open a refreshing can of beans”. This phrase was so often posted that it must have been some bug in the code I’d written for the bot, but it was just too funny to find and fix, so it kind of became one of TMF’s enduring character traits.
A bad habit I got into while developing that game was building prototypes of other games or minigames inside the project itself. And I long had wanted to make a mancala game at some point, simply because I had fallen in love with the game many years ago, playing a couple of variations on it; a physical board in my school library that used glass beads, and a version on my mum’s Nokia 3310 that was called “Bantumi”. So I reasoned, hey, I could make a game about this, and I already have all these bean assets… and Bean to Me was born, with its name being both the objective of the game and a loving nod to that Nokia 3310 version.
This early version of Bean to Me completely sucked; I never actually put visuals in, there were just numbers floating above rectangles. The player couldn’t choose a slot to play, the game just played out randomly from all available moves for both sides. Bonus turns weren’t a thing, and steals were buggy. It sat in a debug menu for a few years and then was forgotten about.

Beans, Resurrected

After the demo for TMFBMA came out in 2021, something happened. The C# framework it had been built with, Otter 2D, ceased being maintained. We had already had some issues with trying to add multi-platform support to it that would have necessitated a large reworking of the engine, so Emmy was inspired to start a new project called Lutra Game Framework - a spiritual successor to Otter2D that would allow us to continue developing TMFBMA and small-form 2D games like it, but with improved multiplatform support and based on newer versions of dotnet. Emmy worked hard to produce a stable backend for Lutra that allowed me to work with her to port TMFBMA’s demo to it; by porting it 1-to-1, we could be sure that Lutra would be able to support our development needs.
However, life and work began to get somewhat busy for the both of us, and so progress was slow. The demo was eventually ported over, but it didn’t feel great to have worked for so long on a project with nothing new to show for it.
Fast-forwarding to early 2024, when we were hanging out with Robin, Andrew, and Matthew and beginning to set up Very Evil Demons, I wanted a project I could work on at the same time as helping get the co-operative off the ground; something with a small, realistic scope that I could construct using the stable base we had built with Lutra, and I was reminded of that early version of Bean to Me while digging through old code. While musing about Bean to Me and its origin, I had a flash of inspiration!
Some of the board games my family played when I was a kid had missing pieces; my sister and I often ended up substituting other board game pieces in for the missing parts, and then occasionally giving them special “house rules” when those altered pieces came into play. I’m already the kind of person obsessed with twisting rules in games, either through intended mechanics or through pure folk-play invention.
Doodling idly on my whiteboard one day, all these ideas coalesced into a single solid thought - Bean to Me would become a fully-realized game, based on Mancala but with special pieces that would do things to the rules.

Building Beans

Bean to Me’s actual development was pretty smooth; the total turnaround from a blank project to the finished game was just under six months, which is possibly the fastest non-game-jam project I’ve ever worked on - especially since I only really dedicated my evenings and weekends to it. I mostly worked on it myself, doing the majority of the art, design, UI, and gameplay code - but it would never have been possible to produce the finished game without the tireless effort of the other demons. Emmy worked on making sure Lutra was rock-solid and stable for its first use in a published game, along with writing and producing the excellent soundtrack. Robin, Matthew, and Andrew all helped me test out the game’s balance and networking code, letting me write a networked-multiplayer game in record time.
Together, we collectively decided that Bean to Me would be the first thing we published officially as a group on Steam. None of us had actually gone through the entire Steam publishing process from start to finish, so it would be a very valuable learning exercise in how the Steamworks API and the overall Steam Store worked. We’re happy to be able to take that information forward with us now that the game’s out there. It was a lot of fun preparing for the Steam Next Fest, and we took the game to a number of smaller local games events here in Scotland to gauge interest and get player feedback. Amongst those, we showed the game at Dundee Contemporary Arts’ “Drop in and Play” event, which was just fantastic for giving us a ton of feedback from players of all ages!

The Present and Future of Beans

And that brings us pretty much up to where we are today! The game is out, and we’ve had players from just about all over the world picking it up here and there. As we didn’t really have any kind of marketing budget or strategy, our sales count is small at around fifty sales so far - but this is far better than I actually thought it would be! For a game primarily intended as a learning exercise, made in weekends and off-days over six months, I couldn’t really ask for better. In addition, it has brought us all closer together at Very Evil Demons, and given us some insight into how we might manage more serious projects, going forwards.
As for Bean to Me itself, we’ve already had some great feedback in our Steam reviews and in other correspondance. There’s a number of quality-of-life tweaks I want to make to make it just a little bit of a better experience, and I also want to add a couple of stockfish-inspired super-difficult unlockable opponents at some stage, so that players who have squeezed everything out of the singleplayer mode get just a little more fun out of it. I’m also still eternally coming up with new ideas for beans too, so probably I’d also include a bunch of new beans with such an update.
Right now though, we have some other projects and work to attend to; as Bean to Me is something closer to a side-project, we likely can’t devote much more development time to it until our other work settles down! Stay tuned for more news about our upcoming projects by subscribing to our RSS feed and by keeping an eye on our social media channels.
That’s all from me for now - thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day!

~ Jordan, a Very Evil Demon