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Bear With Me - From a 2007 Java Console Game to Steam

17 Aug 2026

Dificulty ★★☆☆☆

This one is not about MicroStrategy or Qlik. This is a side project I finally finished after 17 years.

Where it started

Back in 2007 I wrote a tiny game in Java. It was a text-only console program. It asked for your name, the name of a friend, and then told a very short story: you walk through a forest, you hear a scream, you run to help, and you come face to face with a bear.

That was it. No sound, no images, just System.out.println and a few if branches.

public static void glavno()
{
    System.out.println();

    String ime;
    System.out.print("Kak ti je ime? ");
    ime = BranjePodatkov.preberiString();

    System.out.print("Ime enga frenda? ");
    String frend;
    frend = BranjePodatkov.preberiString();

    System.out.print("Nekoc je sel po gozdu " + ime + ". ");
    System.out.println("Nakar je srecal " + frend + "-ta. ");
    System.out.println("Ko se pogovarjata zaslisita krik. ");
    System.out.println("Prihitita in naenkrat ");
    System.out.print("srecata medveda!! Kaj storis? ");
    System.out.println();
}

Every choice branched into a different (usually terrible) ending. That was the whole joke - most decisions get you killed, in increasingly stupid ways.

Why I picked it up again

The story always deserved more than a black console window, but drawing art and recording voices for a dumb joke game was never realistic for one person. In 2025/2026 that changed. With AI tools I could finally add the two things it was always missing: voices and images.

So I rebuilt it.

The rebuild - Ren’Py

I moved the whole thing from Java to Ren’Py, which is a Python-based engine made for visual novels. It handles the things I did not want to build myself: save/load, a menu system, text display, transitions, persistent data across playthroughs.

The core is still just labels and menus. A choice looks like this:

menu:
    "What do you do?"

    "Start running away":
        jump coward_ending

    "Throw rock at your friend":
        jump murderer_ending

    "Throw rock at the bear":
        jump bear_food_ending

    "Make a call":
        jump call_option

Each ending unlocks a flag in persistent.endings_unlocked, and there is an ending gallery screen that shows what you have found so far. Once you unlock all the “normal” endings, a hidden true ending opens up where the character starts to remember all the previous timelines - basically a Groundhog Day joke baked into the save system.

AI for voice and images

At first I wired every line up manually with a play sound call pointing at a specific file, like "audio/00_Preglog/rob_Suddenly_you_hear_a_scream.mp3". That works, but it gets messy fast with hundreds of lines.

So I switched to Ren’Py’s automatic voice system. You set one config line:

$ config.auto_voice = "voice/{id}.mp3"

After that, Ren’Py automatically plays the matching voice file for each line of dialogue based on the line’s ID - I just had to name the audio files to match. No more manual play sound per line, and the images are handled the same “just point at the file” way for each scene.

One Ren’Py + Steam gotcha: saves

Ren’Py has its own built-in “Sync” feature that uploads saves to Ren’Py’s public servers and gives the player a code. On Steam this is redundant and can confuse players, because Steam has its own Steam Cloud.

I disabled the Ren’Py one:

define config.has_sync = False

And used Steam Auto-Cloud instead (Steamworks > Application > Cloud > Steam Auto-Cloud), pointing at Ren’Py’s save location:

Now saves and the endings gallery (persistent) sync automatically through Steam, no codes needed.

Result

A short, fully voice-acted comedy visual novel about two friends, a bear, terrible decision-making, and pizza delivery drones. 14 endings, most of them wrong, one of them true.

17 years is a long time to wait for a punchline, but here it is.

Play it

The game is free and takes about 20 minutes to play: Bear With Me: The Pizza Chronicles Prequel on Steam.

If you play it, let me know which ending you found first - and which one I forgot to include.