Bionic Bay from original Badland designerBionic Bay from original Badland designer

Author: Mureena

Reveal trailer in Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKTT84Qh9sk

Bionic Bay website: https://bionicbaygame.com/
 

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1928690/Bionic_Bay/

Epic Games Store: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/bionic-bay-93dd7c
 

I’m a Finnish game designer/artist working at my independent game company Mureena. Before Mureena I co-founded Frogmind in 2012. There as a two man team we created indie hits Badland and Badland 2. Those games earned a good amount of success including Bafta nominations and Apple Design Award. However, I departed Frogmind in 2016 to continue making independent, high quality video games.
 

I’m currently creating Bionic Bay in collaboration with the Taiwanese Psychoflow Studio. Our journey started back in 2019 when I was skimming through Reddit and came across a video with a genius game mechanic. I thought that it was innovative and versatile enough to build a whole game around it. I contacted the programmer who had sent the video. He turned out to be just a student living in Taipei, Taiwan. We started a conversation in Discord and got along very well and so the development for Bionic Bay started. Even still today 99% of our communication is purely texting in Discord but it has actually worked out really well. Needless to say, the global pandemic has not really affected our work.
 

The core gameplay in Bionic Bay is built around the Swap mechanic. The idea behind it is quite simple: the player has the ability to swap position between the character and the selected object. The catch is that whatever inertia these objects have, it remains after the swap. As our game is heavily physics based, this gives lots of intriguing possibilities in level design. Also, it is a lot of fun to use it.
 

The art in Bionic Bay is quite distinctive. Assets are pixel art and we have used relatively small pixel sizes. To add realism and tone, the lights, glows, and shadows are not pixelated and are presented in a fairly realistic manner. We have also located the in-game cameras fairly far. This makes using swap mechanics more convenient but also makes the overall feel of the game more spacious and epic.
 

Levels in Bionic Bay are unique in multiple ways. There is a large variety of objects, devices, explosives, liquids and traps - each with their own physical properties and functions. The end result is an experience, which feels fun and a little bit different every time you play it.