bunnies vs. bunnies
Hi all! My name’s Jordan, I currently live in Korea, and like Vede, this is my first ever LD entry. If you’d like to know a bit more about me, I’ve got a little bio over at my website. I’ve been out of game creation for a long time, but am excited to be back into it, and I had a lot of fun with this mini LD. I collaborated with a friend in the States via Skype, who contributed ideas, and created the graphics. We kind of mucked about most of Saturday trying to fix on an idea, but then spent Sunday through Wednesday working hard. We completed and posted the game yesterday, just making it in under the “Wednesday weekend” radar, but I was too tired to post anything else at the time 
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Anyway, the game is sort of a platform rts, kind of, with rabbits. You can get it from the LD entry page, or via direct download link (Windows exe).
Tools: Game Maker 7, Photoshop.
If you’d like to know a bit more about the game and the creation process, and how the heck it fits with the theme, just hit the break (you may want to try playing the game first, as it’s a bit spoilery):
So basically, we decided to go pretty literal with the tragedy theme, and try to make a game about exploitation, racism, and genocide. Wow, that’s a mouthful. We also wanted to try to work in the humor angle somehow (crazy, I know), which is one of the reasons we went with cute bunnies exploding. There’s nothing about the game that’s “haha” funny, but there is kind of a black humor there, I think.
The idea was to make a game that started out looking like a basic resource management/rts kind of thing (and cute, to boot), but then gradually became more and more sinister, ending with the player complicit in genocide. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time because genocide, racism, oppression of minorities are very real problems in places I’ve lived, and I want to see games that speak to issues like these. I’ve also always thought that something like this would work well as a game, because so many games are actually already about genocide, but the games are abstracted enough that players don’t really consider that what they’re being asked to do is wipe out another race of people, or robots, or whatever. So in a way, the game is a critique of gaming, and game playing. No so much saying that games like StarCraft or Total Annihilation are bad (two of my favorite games of all time, actually), but just asking people to think. I also wanted to get away from the classic idea of “balancing the sides,” by pitting the player against a game where the sides were clearly unbalanced. I think a two player game where one player played the aggressor and the other played the victim would be great.
Anyway, this is all mostly theoretical mumbo jumbo, and I’m certainly not claiming to have accomplished any grand goals with the game we managed to produce in five days.
About that. Here’s a little timeline:
As the game stands right now, a lot of necessary coding work is in place to make something decent, I think, but a lot needs to be polished up, and balanced out, etc. etc. We had very little time, at the end of the process to make the actual levels for the game, which would have ideally had more time set aside for them. There’s a lot to be done! But I would love to get any feedback anyone is willing to give.
I think that’s about all I have to say at the moment. It’s been fun, and I am looking forward to playing the other entries!
I like the art. It seemed to be lagging on the large level where shooting bunnies was introduced, perhaps some optimization could be done for stuff that is offscreen? Also, a minimap would be very helpful, a quick glimpse of where most of blue is, where to find the resources I want and so on.
Thanks Almost, for the feedback. I was considering a minimap, so I’ll get on that right away. As soon as I do some more speed optimizations that is
. Would you mind telling me how much processor/RAM you played it on? The game runs Okay on my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo laptop, with 2GB ram, so I thought it was maybe fast enough, but I guess not.
Hmm, I tried running at again and it seems to run sort of smoothly now; I probably just misinterpreted the relatively low framerate of the rabbit animations as being indicative of lag before.. Although it is difficult to tell what framerate I’m getting. Either way, it’s still completely playable; it just seemed to be slower)
I have 2.4GHz AMD Dual Core, 6GB Ram, Vista
Also, it seems that gatling guns are meant to cost 500, (for that is the indicated number, and I cannot build them if I have fewer than that much of the resource), but building one only drops my wealth by 100. Using the build key as the on/off key is a little weird. And the shots come from the tip of the gun, not the center, it seems, so if it is right next to a wall, it is possible to totally miss the wall by shooting from the other side of the wall (or inside the wall, whichever).
The other thing that bothered me was that the reticle was flat black color, and thus very hard to see sometimes. A muzzle flash when shooting or a different color reticle might be more visible.
Thanks a lot Almost, for the detailed feedback! Very helpful.
Gatling guns: yes, they should deduct $500 from the bank… though after playing with them costing $100, I think $500 would be way too steep–do you agree?
Build key as to flip turrets: I generally feel that the fewer keys the better, and that context sensitive action buttons are a good way to go. Do you disagree in general, or just feel like this particular case is awkward?
Bullet action point: thanks for pointing that out. Some pixel measurements definitely need to be tweaked.
Black reticle: good point. Perhaps if it was outlined in white?