According to Game Post, one of Bungie’s unannounced projects, codenamed ‘Gummy Bears,’ has changed development hands. The outlet reports the upcoming title is now in the hands of an internal, unnamed PlayStation team that features “around 40” ex-Bungie staff.
Last year, Bungie laid off 220 employees following the release of Destiny 2: The Final Shape. It also moved 115 employees over to PlayStation Studios to build out one of its projects said at the time to be in incubation. Prior to Shape’s release, Gummy Bears was described as “in a holding pattern” while Bungie put its focus on that Destiny 2 expansion, and now its extraction shooter Marathon.
Gummy Bears has been described by Game Post as a team-based MOBA (the genre made popular by Riot Games’ League of Legends and Valve’s DOTA 2) which marks Bungie’s first foray into that particular genre. It’s also reportedly designed with a younger audience in mind, as opposed to older demographics drawn to previous titles like the Destiny and Halo series.
Last September, Game Post noted a then-recent patent filing from Bungie concerning “controlling game behavior of defensive objective characters in a virtual environment.” The patent noted the mechanic has been used in genres like MOBA and tower defense titles, and the inclusion of “behavior trees” for defensive AI units, which “may be used to control the actions of the defensive objective character.”
In the past, a patent filing from Bungie for touchscreen controls on phones and handheld devices was discovered in advance of the reveal for Destiny: Rising, a mobile spinoff of the studio’s sci-fi shooter franchise.
You can read Game Post’s full breakdown on what ‘Gummy Bears’ is here. Game Developer has reached out to PlayStation for comment, and will update when a response is given.