I love this game!
I only don't really like the level system. Playing the same level again only with less time to forage for food is hardly what I would call a reward and I'm not even sure if its possible without luck to beat the 1min level.
I know you said you were finished with this game, but I like it so much I can't help but think about how it could be even better. If you could bear with my rudeness
I would like to talk about a few things I was thinking about that could improve the game should you chose to expand it.
The real challenge behind the game is properly operating a car as a bear, getting fish and berries and hibernation under a time limit is nothing but things to give the challenge focus.Ideally one might think everything in the car would be operated with two mice, one for each hand so you can have one hand on the wheel while the other operates the gas, shift and deals with anything entering the vehicle. Of course this is unreasonable to expect because of OS limitations as well as the limitations of the human brain, controlling two mice at once would be difficult indeed. Right now instead you can drive the car with the wasd keys.
This is a good way to tackle the problem, but I think with a little more effort you could make the cockpit controls all the more fantastic without making the controls too difficult to handle.
Create a second bear hand sprite that clings on to the wheel (perhaps coming from the left hand wall to suggest his elbow sticking out the window). The A and S keys operates the hand and spins the wheel to the right and left.
You could put in a bear foot to operate the gas and break, but I feel that would make the controls too easy. The second hand should be at work pushing the gas, changing gears and grabbing food.
A ignition key you start at the beginning that turns on the radio music would be a lovely touch.
So now we have two bear hands with solid controls operating a car.
As I said the challenge in the game comes from trying to operate the car as a bear, but even more importantly, the fun comes from the wacky experience, adding more little touches to the game that make it so charming.
I came up with a few ideas, like when you toss badgers out of your car you get a visual feed back, seeing them fly out in front of the car, and having it be possible to toss them into the cars of other bears causing them to flip out and crash, or toss rocks out to knock down items stuck in trees like honeycombs but I think thats all asking too much.
As I said above, limiting the amount of time the player has is no fun, it would be really cool if you could throw together a travel mode, where there is no time limit. Rather than have Berries and Fish fill a fullness meter, they are kept count of as a score, the over all goal being to eat as much as possible before the car breaks down. Whether that be by crashing enough or running out of fuel. Juggling these two would keep the player from being overly cautious or hasty as leaving the engine running consumes gas by itself and sudden but slow jerks use up more than a constant speed.
The cave entrances would lead you to a tunnel you would drive along for a moment as the game loads a new randomly generate area on the other side.
Of course lastly to make things really complete, you could use your wonderful creativity to add all sorts of rare and unusual features to the game that reward the player for getting farther and playing longer. You could even set for them to be triggered after a certain score is reached. Things as simple from recolored golden fish and blue berries to new encounters like gas stations and deer.
I'm sorry if this is a bit much but I just see so much potential in this game as a epic single player exploration game.
You could even go so far as to make a specific goal for the player that is difficult but counts as a true victory, like collect all X of special item X. Or replace the limited gas with the bear getting hungry, roaring at the player when he starts to starve and make it a specific journey as the bear decides to make a journey across land with increasingly harder to find food. .
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