My Kingdom for a Rabbit! by incobalt
Queen Beatrix Silktail is the last of her line, and now the crown must be passed on, or else the rabbits return to being just mere animals. Suss out the best heir in the fifteen weeks allotted by the fickle crown. My Kingdom for a Rabbit! is a game about information gathering and deciphering.
Controls
This game is entirely mouse-driven. In the standalone builds (not web) use escape to close if you're in fullscreen. (Standalone builds can also take screenshots with Home.)
Gameplay
There are fifteen eligible rabbits to rule, send them out, four at a time, on tests to determine their suitability for the rabbitdom. You may need to take notes!. Rabbits are randomized each game. If you think you know which rabbit is a good heir, you can stop early. After fifteen weeks are up, you have one last chance to announce an heir. After, the rabbit's reign is evaluated, so you can see how well you did.
Notes
The music in the builds seem a bit quiet to me. If you're not hearing music, you should! I intended a lot more with this game, but I like where I've gotten in 48 hours. I make no guarantees that it will be easy or hard to find an heir. Mac build is totally unstested! There's an X86 and an X64 Windows build. If you don't know which one to use, try the X86 first.
Fun Fact!
Did you know that Beartix Potter's birthday was Friday? I didn't either, but when I found out, I decided to make a game about rabbits in waistcoats. I hope you enjoy!
Tools
Engine: Unity 5.5
Art: Paint.Net
Sound: Lmms
Postmortem
Ratings
| Overall | 235th | 3.472⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 482th | 2.833⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 153th | 3.5⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 213th | 3.722⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 349th | 3.167⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 324th | 2.818⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 116th | 3.2⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 144th | 3.412⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
My carefully selected heir, the cream of the crop, resulted in a kingdom totally ruined. That offends me, and proves that choosing heirs by their name is not a good strategy.
When you have figured out how to have a good eye it seems a bit easy, but it can be tricky.
Good job, I like your interpretation of the theme, rabbits should never lose their power! never!
The graphics were good and the music is nice as well. Not much else to say here.
The gameplay is really interesting. It feels like an interactive fairy tale and puzzle game in one. I'm not sure if there's an optimal way to play, but it has been fun trying to figure out what's going on.
Overall I really liked it. Good work.
@joe-miller Unity font sharpness is my bane and I spent at least two hours trying to tweak it for readability. The f in the font looks a lot like an i (I had trouble telling sometimes).
@milano23 Thanks! The music is there, just really quiet. Unless there's a browser issue with WebGL that I don't know about (which is entirely possible!).
I did successfully choose the right rabbit, and the rabbitdom did very well, but it was still disappointing that the rabbits' performance wasn't steady. For a test, I took four rabbits, and had them take the same test five times. Jaja failed all of them, Trin passed all but one, Dalsop failed all but one, and Kalsedon failed three and passed two.
It is really great that you don't have to finish all fifteen tests before you choose an heir. And I do like that there seem to be three levels of proficiency, which helps with the realism. Also, it isn't necessary for the best rabbit to be perfect in all aspects to be a good ruler.
Overall, I think this has great potential, but I think that you took it in a bit of the wrong direction with the unpredictability. There are just not enough weeks, and too many candidates to have the rabbits go through enough tests to have statistical proof of the right heir. It should be assumed that the tests are accurate measures of the rabbit's ability in that area.
@good-enough Yeah, this is my one sticking point with myself. The game isn't deterministic enough at all. Could have made it a straight comparison, fairly easily, but decided to do a die roll check instead. Much more is planned, and it's going to be logical, rather than guesswork.
@michael-feldman Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@cnoble I agree, except that you need to test rabbits multiple times to really get a good feel for them. I did give you the ability to stop early, though!
I really liked this game, it's just like a big riddle. The graphics were nice, but I couldn't hear the audio. I read a few comments and found out that the audio is definitely there, I'm just too afraid to pull up my volume that high. It would've been nice to see a graphic of the rabbits working on their tests, as well. I also didn't see how the theme fit into the game until I read the theme again in the credits. Yup, the queen is definitely running out of power.
Overall, it's a lovely game!
---
Possible Suggestion: Art was good, music was okay but very soft (simple fix for that one). I think the easiest way to make it a more interesting game would be to make sure that there is no 'perfect' rabbit, and then have a different ending for each combination. Some rabbits would be more successful than others at different things, but there is no such thing as a perfect ruler. That would give you 10 different ending segments (1 good and 1 bad for each category) and any extra ones that you would want to be special. 31 different endings if you wanted each to be unique, but a small paragraph for each would give this game a metric ton of replayability.
---
Suggestions aside, solid product. Writing was good, and you definitely could get the fairy tale vibe of it which is what I think you were going for. I'm also a sucker for logic puzzles which this seems to be.
@philip45 Your suggestions are absolutely something I wanted to incorporate, but I had to cut for time. Technically, there is no perfect ruler in this one, either (no rabbit can have max stats, and a rabbit with a low stat can still be a good ruler), but I'd like to make it where we see the highlights of the heir's rule based on their stats, similar to what you're saying.
It is very impressive, how you have made such an atmospheric and interesting game, from a relatively simple set of components working really well together. It seems that you are quite skilled at time management! :-)
As have been mentioned previously, the music fits the game well, although the volume is a bit too low. Also, I agree with previous commenters, that the random elements could probably have been better in some kind of "between round" events, rather than to obfuscate the results of the trials. The random outcome of the trials feels a bit unintuitive.
The art fits the mood well, and the small touches (like the individual names of the would-be heirs, and the storytelling-feel of the results of the trials) really makes the game come alive. I like the take on the theme as well, interpreting power as political power (I had the same interpretation of the word in my game).
All in all, this was a very nice game! Nice work!
>To Rule the Rabbits,
>You must pass the five trials!
>Choose the heir wisely...
@somnium Thanks! I don't think I quite accomplished this, but I did what I could in the time I had. As for the random elements, that was a split-second decision that I should have done the other way. Oh well. The next version will be different.