Welcome to Bunny Hop's official Dev Blog, a game developed by U-Tad students.
As you can see we have changed the website blog.
In this first post we will prepare to summarize all the work done until November 25.
Now then, let us talk what the game is about. Bunny Hop is a third person puzzle game in which we control Jack J. White, a rabbit whose goal is to move through a series of spatial reasoning, head breaking puzzles and reach the carrot at the end of each level. His movement is limited to a 2 space jump, having to use its environment and obstacles to his advantage.
One thing we’ve been mingling with a lot during the development was the movement of the character. We have changed it several times, as the first iteration did not convince us entirely. Currently we are on the third iteration, based entirely through the animation controller.
At first, we had a system of tiles in which the world measured double the units it needed to be. This altered the movement of the rabbit in a way that would make it very difficult to introduce new mechanics, so we decided to change that system for one based on a grid.
But this new system also caused too many problems that affected the game's performance and issues between the members to understand where to put what for the mechanics to work, so we decided to scrap it too.
So, currently we have a new movement based around the new and improved animations of the rabbit, making it much easier to add events depending on mechanics and particles to each interaction.
Talking about mechanics we have been implementing the following to create new and interesting puzzles:
•
Lava: whenever the bunny lands on a lava block, it will jump forward 2 blocks. It is a normal jump, but the player is forced to jump in the direction of movement.
•
Ice: the bunny slides forward until it reaches a normal ground block or falls to its doom.
•
Mole: every time the bunny jumps the mole switches sides in the world. If the bunny lands on the mole when he appears on the side he is currently on, he will be pushed back one block.
•
Sled: it transports the bunny forward a number of spaces. Once the sled has moved, it will not move again.
The art of the game has suffered several modifications. In our first prototype, we had blocks with very flat textures and shape. Going through the development of Bunny Hop, we realized that it was increasingly necessary that the art changed, as it would make the game extremely more appealing.
With the last changes to the movement, we changed the rabbit model and improved the textures of the different blocks for a second prototype. However, these changes are provisional until we have the final art and models for the game.
Actually, we have an artist who is collaborating with us, creating new models and textures that we will implement. This artist has given us a new point of view and has made us rethink how to focus the art of Bunny Hop so that it has a more hand drawn look, instead of the cubic feel it had at the start.
To encourage progress and the possibility of replayability we decided to create a scoring system based on the number of moves. Depending if the player completed that level with the least amount of movements possible, he will obtain one, two or three stars.
For the HUD, we decided that it should not take a lot of space in the screen. We have put buttons for the essential needs during gameplay: restart, options menu and camera rotation.
The camera rotation was implemented after the first playtest we made. The playtesters were very frustrated to how the bunny should move, which key moved the bunny in which direction. We solved this by changing the position of the camera based on the needs of the level and added the buttons to rotate the camera horizontally and vertically.
We will bring you more updates, where we introduce new mechanics, new enemies and more!
Thanks for reading!
Community
