Bunny Loop by Fedora

Bunny Loop is an exploration game where you control a bunny trying to escape the endless loop of life and death.



- Explore and try to survive in a wild and randomly generated world
- Gain upgrade points to upgrade your character while you play
- Play with mouse and keyboard or joystick
- Find the true story behind the rabbits
Estimated play time: 10 - 15 minutes
Ratings
| Overall | 816th | 3.489⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 765th | 3.37⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 970th | 3.185⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 898th | 3.533⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 704th | 3.663⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 371th | 3.36⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 409th | 3.756⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 89🗳️ | 54🗨️ |
Even though bunnies hop around, they still have a consistent flow to their movement. You may have wanted to emulate the hopping here, but I'd argue that player control is more important so personally I would suggest just having a constant motion when moving around and let the hop animation make it feel like a hop. But that's personal opinion.
I was confused about what to do at first. You have the "upgrade" text visible in the hut, but not the "exit" until you get near it, which I would argue is more important for people playing the game for the first time. I would probably show both always rather than having it be positional.
That movement decision was quite difficult to make. We didn't want to make something generic, and having the bunny hop around felt like a good idea at the time, but I guess innovation for innovation's sake isn't good either. I'm definitely writing this one under "lessons learned" :smile:
I understand the issue with the exit not being marked at the start. The idea of having the "upgrade" text visible was to have players naturally see the upgrade tree and know that they have to get to the end of the research tree. Maybe having the "exit" text appear after they check the upgrade tree for the first time would have been a better solution to this.
Something to consider about drawing attention to the upgrade tree first might be that it's useless to the player until they have points to upgrade with. So when they see it, it has this sort of "Oh, that's nice, but useless right now" feeling to it. I sorta felt that and immediately closed it out without looking into it.
But at the same time I can understand wanting to put the upgrades up front, especially in a jam game where some people might not even experience the upgrades depending on the length of their session. Tricky situation.
The "Now playing" music player surprised me when it first came up. But it's a nice variety of music and knowing the song's name was appreciated.
The hopping movement is fine and pretty fun - but when you get the speed upgrade, it can lead to situations where the increased jump distance makes it really hard to reach a brush of berries or an upgrade stone, as moving back and forth always takes the bunny just past it. Have to do sort of a drive-by, haha.
It feels like trying to keep the bunny from dying wasn't really worth stressing over, as you'd respawn with all evolution points still intact. It made more sense to always keep pushing on recklessly instead of trying to focus on not taking damage / finding food. Maybe it you lost (some) evolution points on death, but the purchase costs were lowered to compensate, that could be changed?
At any rate, cute little game. I wish the bunnies the best of luck in their ...... future endeavours. :smirk:
The art and music are both great, the game itself is pretty polished. One minor thing I noticed is that you still get the popup to pick berries when going near a berry bush that hasn't grown new berries yet.
In terms of balance, I think going for berries (even after the upgrade) is kind of pointless unless they're already on the way to the upgrade-rock-thing. I feel like you use more energy going for them than you get back.
Overall, great game! I really enjoyed it. Well done!
Once I had upgraded the jump, I started bumping into things more often, and it was sometimes tricky to get around objects. One option might be to speed up the frequency of the jumps but decrease their distance, so that you can still go fast but also turn quicker if you need
I just thought the bunny movement a bit chunk, some times was difficult to maneuver
In some ways it also turns the speed upgrade into an interesting choice, to trade speed for precision (not that the player realizes this beforehand). But I think that's really cool. I like games that can scale up to the player's ability to handle something. The lvl 2 speed made me think just a bit harder on the best way to move.
I ended up just gunning down the left side of the skilltree to close out the game. I didn't actually expect there to even be a skilltree and that added an extra of engagement for me.
Nice mood, nice music, nice job!