Space! Race! I Am Bread Adds New Game Modes
Tasty.
Two new game modes have been added to Bossa Studios' hyper-realistic staple food simulator I Am Bread [official site]: Zero G, which takes our plucky sliced hero into the final frontier, and Bagel Race, which stars an all-new fresh baked good.
Here's a lovely 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute trailer to celebrate the updates:
Zero G involves using attitude thrusters to try and position your bread relative to the toaster before you can slide it into place. I'm a little confused as to how the toaster actually works in space - perhaps it's covered in solar panels? You'd need a really long cord otherwise. No need for idiotic speculation with Bagel Racing: as the name suggests it demands you roll a bagel around a room as quickly as you can.
But I Am Bread is still in Early Access, I hear you cry! Is 'unfinished game updated' truly news? To answer this entirely reasonable question, I felt compelled to make a special exception for I Am Bread not only because I'm a sucker for The Blue Danube waltz, but because these new modes significantly change the mechanics of the game and in doing so illustrate a development philosophy I rather admire:
One of the big challenges we set ourselves after that first bread video went viral, was to create a game which could deliver on the promises shown in the footage and importantly to prove that it was not just a gimmick but an actual game.
We entered Early Access feeling happy that we’d appropriately expanded upon that core control mechanic and that the original idea had been turned it into a proper goal based game with progression and the start of narrative structure.
We knew that we would continue with the story and the levels but buoyed by the wonderful responses and ideas from the community we asked ourselves, what else could we do? How far could we take it?
I think nothing encapsulates better how the team decided to respond to this question than the idea that with each new environment that got unlocked, we’d also unlock an entirely new game mode, which would reinvent the existing game levels and make them all fresh again. This meant that for every updated level we would have to make new bread, a new control system, new game mechanics, new UI, new level layouts and rebalance everything for all the new content, a much bigger scope than was ever imagined at the start!
Honestly, I think that's a thoughtful and savvy response to the challenge of developing a game that might easily have been dismissed as gimmickry designed to captivate the mighty YouTube dollar. It's earned Bossa a sale; here's hoping I don't get, ah, burned?