Path of the Rabbit by managore

HOW TO PLAY
build a small world full of paths for your rabbit to follow. you can build on top of old tiles, but you can only build five tiles wide, five tiles deep and five tiles tall. run out of water or carrots, or get stuck on the edge, and its game over!
each time you place a tile your rabbit gets thirsty, so frequently visit oases to fill up on water
as your rabbit travels along the path, it feeds and gains carrots which are useful when fighting off foes such as foxes. successfully fighting off three opponents levels your rabbit up and increases its maximum carrots by two
and it will need all the carrots it can get for when the boss arrives!

CONTROLS
use the arrows and space to move around and choose where to place tiles
press m to toggle mute
press alt + enter to toggle fullscreen
press r to restart the game
press escape to go back to the title

HINTS
there are three ways to lose the game, and avoiding them is very important
firstly, whenever you send your rabbit towards a foe, make sure your rabbit will have enough health
secondly, make sure you never take (or force yourself to take) a route that leads to the edge of the world, as there's no way to turn your rabbit around after this happens
thirdly, make sure you always have enough time to visit an oasis - it can be very easy to forget about it for a few turns and find your rabbit in an impossible situation

ABOUT
wowee, my eleventh Ludum Dare! I wanted to try and make something really different to what I usually make, and I'm happy I tried to. sorry if this game is quite hard, there was a very fine line between making it impossibly difficult and trivially easy, but I think I found a nice middle ground
made using GameMaker:Studio, Aseprite, Jfxr, FL Studio and LICEcap, using colours from DawnBringer's 32 color palette (plus some of my own) and inspired by the board game Tsuro

FILES
Path of the Rabbit (windows, .exe)
Path of the Rabbit (source, .gmz)
v1.0.1: removed debug buttons, fixed water capacity being 6 instead of 5
v1.0.0: original release
Ratings
| Overall | 7th | 4.337⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 23th | 4.061⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 29th | 4.082⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 143th | 3.745⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 26th | 4.327⭐ | 100🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 92th | 3.547⭐ | 97🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 271th | 2.513⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 46th | 3.916⭐ | 97🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 12🗳️ | 2🗨️ |
1. Not allowed to place enemy on top of other enemy.
2. Not allowed to place enemy next to other enemy (4-cross neighbors)
3. Enemies follows paths just like rabbit does
I liked the game and played it a couple of times. Great job!
The sweep animations looked slick, and the bunny animations enjoyable. I will say that I was initially confused about the tutorial until I looked closely at the itch.io page. Is that the usual?
I tried and figured the gameplay myself (after a few confused runs), and succeeded eventually :)
The game's different parts fit together very well, and we had an instantaneous "let's do another round" effect! :) Except that the audio is pretty minimalist, it's hard to find anything to criticize!
Beautiful graphics and transitions, the only thing that didn't seem to fit in was the bunny portrait at the top.
Graphics and sound-wise, solid work as usual. The concept is kinda counter-intuitive (rabbit fighting foxes?) but the game did a good job explaining it so no problem there. Didn't run into any bugs.
I have tried many times over (feels like 50 or so) but couldn't beat it, I'm too dumb except not really since I wouldn't admit that. I mean, it was the RNG screwing me over for sure - can't find any other explanation for me putting myself in a corner and skipping a bunch of tiles waiting for the one that I need, only to die of thirst. It bugs me because I really want to know what happens at the end.
With the very serious general-vibe stuff out of the way, here are some corner-related nitpicks:
Could use with a better indicator of where the edges of the play area are, it's pretty easy to lose track and accidentally drive yourself into one.
Also would be pretty cool if the game ended when you reach the edge, perhaps with the rabbit jumping off because why not. I know I at least do feel like jumping off the window when he does that.
But still a great entry and a lot of fun to play.
- Worlds edges are barely visible at first, you got stuck without any "warning".
- 70 tiles are really a lot! I think something around 30/40 can be fairer.
- When you got stuck at the edge of the world you just stay there, it can happens in first run that you continue to play without understanding what to do.
- The game over at the edges is quite unfair, given how easily you can get to it: maybe if you could stack tiles on the rabbit to make it go "back" on another route it'll be less punishing. Or maybe there could be world wrapping or rabbit bouncing back on the route, but I cannot think a way to avoid the infinite "loops" this solutions can create.
I loved your previous LD entries also because of the high difficulty level (The Sun and Moon, Reap and Death of a Lich), but this one is really too much! :)
If you do that it would be great to have a progressive difficulty to easy you into it.
Fantastic art, cute sounds and a very solid gameplay.
Great work!
Highly rated by me
But I will try again later ! Awesome work, graphics are really nice and the gameplay and concept are very smart ! Congratulations :thumbsup:

I've managed to beat it once, but a few of my losses felt like something I couldn't have avoided.
At first, my strategy was to try and stay within the middle with fairly short paths. Avoiding the corners/edges means you can't get screwed over from turn tiles because you can usually save yourself from the edge with either a right or left turn. But the problem is that the tile stacks always fill up by the time you get to the boss. Then I tried to fill up the whole board evenly, but it's just too easy to get destroyed by a bad run of 4 or 5 tiles.
Aside from the randomness, I wish there was just slightly more polish and effects for the board movement. Maybe a different color to show your previous path? That would be especially useful for communicating "this is why you lost" after you fall off the edge.
The gameplay definitely fits the theme, although I would have liked to see the graphics do a better job of communicating the theme. Like, maybe some grass and plants on the tiles, or a sun/moon that orbits the world.
As other comments have mentioned, some music would be very nice.
Oh, and I also agree with the idea that this game would be fun on mobile.
I like how each loss condition forces you to play the game. The threat of going off the edge makes you think about pathing more. The threat of dying to foxes forces you to actually use the pathing, and the threat of thirst forces you to stop stalling.
I wonder how adding the ability to "hold" a piece like in tetris would affect the game. Would it make the game more or less strategic?
Anyways great work yet again by the Compo God.
Only thing I would suggest is a "Game Over" mechanic when you've directed your rabbit to a dead end tile. I know I can just hit escape to start a new game immediately, but it would still be nice with a trigger that tells me I have nowhere left to go.
Great job!
If you want to check up not so brutal adventure, here is one ;) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/stardust
As soon as you realize what you're trying to accomplish with the tiles, the depth of the simple rules becomes astonishing, turning the gameplay into a challenging brainteaser.
I would also like a more clear link with the theme, but even with that in mind this is a 5☆ entry!
Impressive work, especially considering the time frame you had to work with all on your own.
Good job!
Really good game design ideas and super addictive!
Only *"problem"* : the random pieces are very frustrating x)
Good job :D
One thing I don't like: when the rabbit "stuck" at the edge of the map, it doesn't game over right away like when you run out of water or carrot. There's no way to connect to the edge, the only thing I could do was placing tiles until water run out, which is confusing.
Maybe make it so the rabbit fall out of edge to visual a game over?
I'd probably make it a lot more clear how the border works, or just let the rabbit walkaround the world.
- The first couple tries were very confusing; something didn't click with me that the bunny starts on a specific edge and only had one option to go forward until a few runs in.
- It would have been nice if the game ended immediately on reaching an edge rather than leaving you there to wait out your remaining turns. It seems like it'd be pretty fitting to have the bunny just hop right off the edge while following the path!
- The UI for showing upcoming pieces could get a bit confusing due to the text being so understated (i.e. I sometimes forgot that the bottom piece was next, and not the top). This could be fixed pretty easily by just having the scale of the very next piece be larger than the others.
- The "barrier" around where you can actually place blocks is similarly very understated, and it's left to the player to pay close attention to the map edges. I feel like a game like this would benefit a lot more from the player being clearly aware of all of the pieces/rules in play so that they don't feel like they're being tricked into fail states, even if it does interfere a bit with the art style.
- On that note, the artwork (although cute) seems a bit arbitrary and doesn't really communicate the theme that well. It gave me more of a board game vibe than "small world".
- The first fox with 3 health has no obvious indication that its stronger, you just have to pay attention to the health dots. If the fox colours alternated on health changes instead of being seemingly random, it would be a lot more noticeable when the difficulty had increased.
- There's nothing to indicate that the cells have a maximum height until it's too late (it's in the LD description, but not the itch.io one or in-game). On top of that, the game length is also balanced such that you reach the maximum height around the same time you reach the boss. It's pretty frustrating to get that far in a run only to lose because of a previously hidden restriction.
There are still some drawbacks like ones Sean S. LeBlanc already noted, but it's overall impressing for a compo entry. To these nitpicking drawbacks, I would like to add that the sound design could benefit from some improvements. The sound effects are a little bit agressive imo, and it could be nice to have a small melody in the background. Also, a sound to warn when we're lacking water could be useful. I sometimes died because I forget this factor, it's more a careless mistake but it can be frustrating when we're deep in the level.
Anyway. Well done to you! A great entry from you once again.
I guess a lot of this was already said, but: indicate the losing condition (stuck at the edge / stuck at the highest tile height) with a flashing R for example, it is very sad to see the rabbit die of thirst and have no way to prevent it. I know it might change the end game a bit, but maybe make the entire world collapse one level down if the two bottom-most levels are completely full? Also there is a visual glitch when fighting stuff on a tile to the south (the tile is drawn over the rabbit), but that's a very minor thing.
Overall, simple but well done!
Personally I didn't find the gameplay that compelling, maybe because I wasn't planning in advance properly or didn't spend enough time playing the game to get a solid grip of it.
I feel the game really needed a failstate animation as your runs just petered out rather than ending "properly". I feel having a ghost rabbit walking the path would also help make the game feel better to play.
However the ui and overall execution was masterful, the level of polish you can put into something is astounding.
Personally I don't think the difficulty is too high. Or rather, it is high, but not in an annoying way - I always feel like I'll crack it the next turn. Just master a few simple rules, and hours of play open up to you. Well done again, I'm always inspired by your games.
I LOST LIKE 20 TIMES.
I WANTED TO SEE THE END, BUT FUCK THIS GAME.
10/10
A lot of feedback has already been given, but I wanna still congratulate you for the mood and feel of the game. Also, I love that you went for a Tsuro style (I discovered the board game a week prior to playing your entry)!
I follow other people's opinion on the edge: there really should be something happening there cause at first I didn't get why I was stuck (I was assuming that if it meant a game over, the rabbit would fall or something like this, but nothing happens)
Pretty solid entry!
Awesome work :)
I would have liked it if you could wrap around the edges of the world, to avoid getting stuck on an edge.
It took me a while before I realized that I could fight the foxes, and that they wouldn't just automatically kill me.
It also took me a while to realize that I could stack tiles on top of ones I'd already laid. Once I realized this was possible, the game really opened up, and I enjoyed it very much.
really nice game!Hope there could be a full version with more levels!
I really want to try this game... Please help?