Somebunny Help Postmortem

Gameplay Images:

The bunny must collect all the carrots and ripe bananas to move onto the next stage. The green unripe bananas and green coconuts are not edible but not harmful either. However, anything other than those can hurt!

The bunny moving onto the next stage after collecting all the edible food.

The shark, in addition to the brown coconuts, will hurt the bunny and you will have to start over again.

The restart page shows when you touch any of the inedible food!

Development Process:

I was inspired by the idea of a hungry bunny stuck in chamber in a spaceship. It was a very random idea but I was attracted to the idea of how some objects could be kicked around with zero gravity. I remembered how my friend's bunny loved to eat carrots and bananas, so I decided to incorporate those as objects that could be collected. I also wanted to add unripe bananas and hard fruits like coconuts that are inedible. Once I created the assets, I made boundaries so that the bunny and objects were limited to the canvas size. I assigned "key" tags to the edible bananas and carrots, so that when the number of keys were equal to 4 in stage 1, it allowed to change to stage 2. Similarly in stage 2, when the number of keys were equal to 5, it moved to scene 3, which was the "you win" page. However, I also had "ouch" tags, which were the brown coconuts and shark, and when the bunny came in contact with them it showed scene 4, which was the Ouch restart page. It was a bit confusing assigning different tags and leading them to different scenes, but once I got the hang of it, it seemed very straight forward. I incorporated buttons on the start and restart pages so that the player could replay or quit (although this doesn't apply in WebGL) to create a loop experience. 

Successes:

I tried to create a consistent, playful visual theme with the graphics I created. They came from my imagination of a hungry bunny trying to escape a dark room with food. There are ripe bananas and carrots that can be collected while unripe coconuts, bananas, and a shark can become obstacles. I think the speed of how the bunny travels within the game works well with the flow of the game. 

Failures / Future Development:

I wanted to import sound by creating them on bfxr, but it didn't work out so well with my laptop. I think there are a couple of things I need to figure out before having it work properly. Another thing for improvement is that the game is straightforward, with obstacles and treats that can be avoided and collected easily. Perhaps if there were more interactive movements that were made by the traps themselves it would be more interesting to play. 

Also, it was difficult to animate the bunny, I think I kept messing up the logic of the movement, but moving on, I would incorporate animation onto the player as well. The assets could be more improved as well, such as adding more dimension into the background with particles or creating more food types to the variation. 

Lessons Learnt:

I realized that there were many more small detailed aspects that I didn't notice when playing games. For example, the color of certain sprites seemed a bit different when they were viewed on the web with a white background which I only noticed after exporting. It also made me realize how important it is to create a loop experience from start to end so that the user can play with ease. All in all, it was a learning experience of how to imagine a small scenario and create that in a visual realm.