First Game

My name is Evan Barker (Wild Goblin). This is my first ever game made with the contributions of artist Jessica (Nermyy) and sound and music artist, Anthony (Pyremonk). This was also Jessica's first ever game. 

This game was made for Global Game Jam 2021 and was an extremely fun time.  We are proud of what we accomplished in such a short amount of time. 

Why Boppin' Bunnies
We wanted something cute, whimsical and nostalgic. I wanted a whack a mole style game and Jessica wanted something adorable but not cruel. We came to the decision to save rabbits with magical hammers in a classic arcade style with a twist. Two different hammers. 

Design and Difficulty
The gameplay was designed from the beginning to focus on opposites. The theme of the game jam was "Duality" so we decided to go Fire and Ice (and everything nice!).  The base difficulty was to be introduced by choosing the elemental hammer opposite of the element it was to extinguish. Ice beats Fire. Fire beats Ice.  The secondary base difficulty was to require the player to grab their hammer to change it. This required skill of dexterity while challenging the player to think of the opposite at the same time requiring intentional thought. 
From there we have the option of continuing development to scaling difficulty and challenge by eventually changing speeds, lives available, bunny types, bunny type frequency. These difficulties were not implemented in this version due to Jam difficulty and scope. (They may be updated later). 

Music and SFX Direction

From Anthony Free (pyremonk): 

Going with the cute & whimsical aspect of the game, I wanted the music to have the same quality while complimenting the action. After having a look at the art, I thought a bouncy, waltz-like piece would fit the aesthetic and the pace of the gameplay. The hand-drawn art also felt to me that the instrumentation should have a ‘classical’ feel to it as well. I hopped into Reaper, conjured up the BBC Orchestra (all puns intended) and got to work on an up-tempo, 6/4 piece featuring a light piano lead in the upper register with some woodwind counterpoint and accompaniment. Looking back I would have liked to have added a bridge section after a second play of the main loop, but I’m quite happy with what made it into the game.

I’m still new to sound design and we brainstormed a list of about 21 sounds all-together so I knew I needed to work on this first and as quickly as possible. The 21 sounds included 2 variations of each core sound (spawn, hit, miss, save) and then a Fire and Ice version of all the core sounds. I checked my sound library for bunny noises and I was surprised that bunnies are pretty boring when it comes to making sound. With that in mind, I also wanted to enlist the team in helping with the sound so we recorded some silly sounds using their voices on my iPhone and I used these as a base layer to each of the bunny-related sounds. After having that, I added layers to emphasize the player action (swinging, saving, hitting, etc.) and the element involved (e.g. bunnies spawning with fire has a gas fire lighting sound layer, ice bunnies have crinkling ice as a layer).

Overall, I had a great with the audio on the game!

Future Thoughts

There are two features we would like to implement. High score and a Mallet cursor for better gamer visibility. 

There are a couple major bugs to fix with a few minor ones. 

After that, we may decide to upload it to steam or leave it as a browser based game.