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 :).
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!
http://necessarygames.com/bunnies_vs_bunnies40.exe
