Bunny Horrors

In early 2018, I was looking for a way to finally create my first game. At a wedding somebody recommended using a game jam as the driving mechanic of such a project to me, and around the time of that month I discovered that I was capable of creating Chip's Challenge clones with my own skill and coding. I signed up for the 72 hour format of Ludum Dare shortly.

It was a disaster, because for all the tutorials I watched and articles I read, I didn't realize one thing: lines of code that exist in an if-statement with the purpose of shutting it off after one execute being called in an update loop should be at the start of the block, not the end. Because of misordered code blocks, one-off functions were being called more than once at a time. Even though Bunny Horrors was practically feature-complete then, the game became a buggy mess that I plain could not figure out what for or how to fix, and due to bad Internet speed I didn't even bother to do a trash submit to the contest site that says "here is the game and I couldn't finish it". In a fit of upset, I disappeared and unpersoned myself. I would return to trying to fix Bunny Horrors later, but I couldn't.

I then started working on a game called Startup Tophat, which would become the first game I ever published, and which taught me what was wrong with Bunny Horrors as I experimentally used this blank space to see what would happen if I went with an if switch_is_on then switch_is_on = false do_stuff() end format to my update-called-event code, but Startup Tophat was looking so good that I decided to finish it before Bunny Horrors anyway.

By some people's reckoning, it might be seen that Bunny Horrors was my real first game because of this, and that Startup Tophat stole that title from it. Quik Game would be released between the two of them.

Bunny Horrors is long-since fixed and perfectly functional since years ago. In this third Hindbodes game, you control a dazed person in a Christmas hat called Waldose, moving from grid space to grid space collecting keys and gold, like Chip's Challenge but without the puzzle-solving premise or instadeath. The game has multiple endings.

The theme for the game jam was "Combine two incompatible genres". That was hard for me to deal with in a satisfying way, and I chose a mix of Halloween and Easter, hence the evil rabbits.

There was a bit of anachronistic humour to Bunny Horrors back when it was in its original three days, because though the southern hemisphere where my family lives celebrates Christmas at the same time as all the other countries that do it, we had a custom April Christmas to say "screw doing it the other way" that year, which meant Christmas was really close to Easter.

The status box says something else now, as the game actually came out several months later, in August, but in the beginning a no-gold status box would say to you:

So it's Halloween for me soon but it's April but there's a Friday the 13th this month but we just dealt with Easter a few weeks ago. Merry Christmas?

Bunny Horrors was also the first game I ever made that had any flimsy claim of the game in general being "about horror". Horror in any of the other Hindbodes games so far - leading from 1-8 or SuTh to Bridge of Fate - was lurking solely inside secret places, instead of being part of the normal quest.

Watch out for the Electroballs. Avoid the Danglomen. Heed the Sluppers. Be careful about how you hoard gold. And be warned of what might happen if you put lines of code that shut off if-statements in the wrong places...

This page was not the original publishing place of the game. This game was originally put online on Gamejolt at roughly 2018 August the 19th 13:58:56 NZST and republished as what you see here later in time.