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[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Rip is an action adventure game starring a rabbit boy named Rip, who must find his missing brother. Along with his friends, he sets off to explore unfamiliar parts of the city while fending off an invasion of strange creatures.





And some screenshots:






We have a demo you can download here.

Default Controls:
(these can be changed from the Escape menu)
Up, Down, Left, Right:   Arrow keys
Run:         Shift
Jump/OK:      Z key
Attack/Cancel:      X key
Inventory:      A key
Investigate:      Spacebar
Escape Menu:      Escape Key (immutable)
Toggle Full Screen:   F11(immutable)


More about development:
Nightmargin and I have been working on this game for almost a year now, and we finally have enough content to put together a demo (if just enough content).
It's being coded in Java using Eclipse, and the music is made in Psycle for the most part.  Nightmargin uses SAI for drawing most of the background scenery.

I plan to post more development updates here as more work is done on the game.  Right now we're in a critical phase where we're taking feedback from people who have played the demo.

Changelog

[Pemanent]

Dang those sound effects are pretty juicy. I like em. Art is pretty nice too.

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Version 0.105 changes

-fixed a script bug where you could get the axe early and break the game a bit
-changed “US” to “*us*” in risa’s dialogue in Rip’s house
-fixed a few typos
-tweaked in-air control
-fixed the wooden box so that entities go in front of it instead of behind it
-cleaned up stray pixels in neighborhood map
-fixed jumping when walking on slopes
-fixed bug where killing the boss when it kills you results in an unwinnable game
-cleared keypress when selecting a script choice so you don’t jump or anything after the event
-removed some wait-frames from the end of the axe swing
-added “Press the Z key!” to the title screen

Download link in the OP updated

[Udderdude]

Your download link is busted .. fixed : http://www.axebunny.com/Download.html

Anyway I tried it out for a bit .. it's cute but didn't really hold my interest for long.

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Your download link is busted .. fixed : http://www.axebunny.com/Download.html

Anyway I tried it out for a bit .. it's cute but didn't really hold my interest for long.

Oh, I guess url tags here don't like/use quotation marks.

Link in the OP updated.

[Nightmargin]

Hello I am Nightmargin I make the pictures happen and stuff.

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Working on the player switching mechanics right now.  In case you didn’t figure it out on your own, Risa is going to be a playable character.

[skittlefuck]

Hello I am Nightmargin I make the pictures happen and stuff.

You got some pretty neat art, looks like watercolor mixed with pixels. Top notch background!

[etodd]

Just bits of honest feedback:

• The tutorial was good except for a minor issue with the inventory. I kept hitting X to skip through the tutorial messages, but then I would hit it one time too many and it would trigger the wrong inventory action, causing ANOTHER tutorial message to pop up saying "no, don't do that..." I did this like four times before I eventually just let the tutorial message run slowly without skipping and finally hit the right button.
• To me at least, the jump sound seems like it doesn't fit with the rest of the game. It reminds me of a cartoon character slipping on a banana. I was expecting it to be less cartoony and more retro-y.
• You probably know this already, but it was not obvious to me at all how to get to the city, even with the arrow carved into the tree. I had no idea which tree branches were climbable. They need to stand out from the rest of the tree and the background.

Overall, looks awesome though. Keep up the good work.

[JosephElliott]

Love the look of this. Those backgrounds!

[JLJac]

Super cute!   Maybe you could try having the same flat-color cutout style for the environments as you're using on the characters, I think it'd look interesting ... ?

Edit - if you want to give those rabbit ears some soft procedural animation I can hook you up with a few tips  

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Just bits of honest feedback:

• The tutorial was good except for a minor issue with the inventory. I kept hitting X to skip through the tutorial messages, but then I would hit it one time too many and it would trigger the wrong inventory action, causing ANOTHER tutorial message to pop up saying "no, don't do that..." I did this like four times before I eventually just let the tutorial message run slowly without skipping and finally hit the right button.
• To me at least, the jump sound seems like it doesn't fit with the rest of the game. It reminds me of a cartoon character slipping on a banana. I was expecting it to be less cartoony and more retro-y.
• You probably know this already, but it was not obvious to me at all how to get to the city, even with the arrow carved into the tree. I had no idea which tree branches were climbable. They need to stand out from the rest of the tree and the background.

Overall, looks awesome though. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the feedback.  The tree branches have had a lot of comments like these, so we might look into making it more obvious that you can jump on them.

Love the look of this. Those backgrounds!

Thank you.

Super cute!   Maybe you could try having the same flat-color cutout style for the environments as you're using on the characters, I think it'd look interesting ... ?

Edit - if you want to give those rabbit ears some soft procedural animation I can hook you up with a few tips  

Night, our background artist, finds the painting of backgrounds easier than pure pixel work, so we'll probably stick with that.  And it's sort of a style we're committed to now.

We'll probably stick to flat frames/animation for the ears for now, although procedural animation is something that I'd like to look into eventually (maybe later in the game).

[Connor]

sprites remind me of cave story!

[Nightmargin]

You got some pretty neat art, looks like watercolor mixed with pixels. Top notch background!

Thank you!

Super cute!   Maybe you could try having the same flat-color cutout style for the environments as you're using on the characters, I think it'd look interesting ... ?

Edit - if you want to give those rabbit ears some soft procedural animation I can hook you up with a few tips  

The flat-color style is mostly reserved for characters and foreground objects in the demo(for contrast) but I'm planning to experiment more with it in the future! (For indoor areas and stuff)
Thank you for the offer!

sprites remind me of cave story!

Yup! Gotta love the classic(|_|) look! (not so much with the body/proportions though. Tiny bodies are harder to animate imo)

[Nightmargin]

Also, incoming art dump.

[EmilMeiton]

Supercute artwork, will definitely keep an eye on this one.

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

I've gotten 2 private messages from people asking if I wanted/needed help with making music for this game, which is odd since I'm pretty sure I said in the OP that I was going to be making all of the music for this (and the demo has music).  Also, the messages were somewhat generic (saying "your project", instead of Rip or whatnot) so I feel like they might have been spam.

But anyways, to further reinforce that I'll be making music, and also just for a regular devlog update, here's a song that will be appearing later in the game most likely:

https://soundcloud.com/girakacheezer/cold-surgery

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

Risa has her weapon now in-game.  I still have to fix up some collision stuff with the knives, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Gonna get started on the new maps for chapter 2 soon.

[LightEnt]

Just a bit of my personal thoughts on the game. I enjoyed the game from a gameplay standpoint, but a few choices in dialogue and gameflow kind of killed the enjoyment off for me.


-I get the feeling that this is a conversation-heavy game, but even so it feels like alot of of the dialogue, be it between characters or just notes or descriptions, have a lot of very lengthy pandering in them. While most of them are pretty funny, by the time I met Risa and she finally finished talking, i really just wanted to stop scrolling through text and get to playing the game.


I feel like a bit too much emphasis was put into exploring characters instead of exploring the game. It rapidly became a visual novel way too fast to hold my attention. Every dialogue kind of felt like a small talk conversation that carried on just a few pointless sentences too long, and i quickly found myself mashing the X key (to no avail) to regain control. HOWEVER once i (finally) got into the park, i began to actually enjoy the game. That boss fight was pretty fun.


If you were to condense about 95% of the non-story-integral script into multi-prompts (like that hilarious grassy spot easter egg), then I feel like this would have been a much more fluid experience. You don't need to dump so much scrolling text on the player everytime they talk to someone or examine something -- if they're intrigued they'll talk again.

Its way better for that kind of text to act as a reward for examining more than once (like the grass spot), instead of running the risk of it feeling like a punishment for examining in the first place (like almost every time i talked to someone).

[GIRakaCHEEZER]

You're the first to complain about there being too much dialogue, but you're not the first to complain about not being about to get through the dialogue fast enough.  I'll look into making it so that you can go through dialogue events faster.

But Rip is very much planned to be a story-driven and plot-heavy game, so it may seem somewhat VN-ish or RPG-ish with the amounts of dialogue, yeah.