Bunny Break In began as a school assignment for a prototyping class during my last year of Game Art. I mistook my teacher’s wording of the assignment and ended up creating a small game. The purpose of the assignment was to simply prototype two levels. We were allowed to use resources from the Unreal store to create our projects, however, I chose to model everything myself.

As mentioned, this game was inspired by my late bunny Mister and my cat Nox who were both very mischievous. Mister often got into places he shouldn’t, and Nox often tried to play with him, which he didn’t like.

The assignment was to have a playable prototype that included several must-haves the teacher wanted. These included obstacles, collectables, lives, level transitions, and a patrolling enemy. It was also intended to be a 3D platformer. Using this brief, I began designing a puzzle platformer.

I watched my current bunnies Beau and Tai (bow tie) who, like Mister, loved to binky, nudge, and toss things. This and the need to be a platformer inspired the main puzzle elements of having maneuverable boxes around the house to hop onto various areas.

There were 3 types of boxes the player could interact with based on what my bunnies could do. Small tossable boxes the character could toss out of their way and low and tall boxes the bunny could nudge and hop onto. Boxes couldn’t push other boxes and needed to be arranged properly and reused in other areas.

Using these mechanics, the player would need to navigate the house from the basement to the bunny pen on the second floor. Several obstacles blocked the player’s path to the next floor, which gradually got more difficult.

Starting in the basement, I made sure the player had free space to explore and get a feel for the game. To keep the player in the basement for a reasonable time, several simple puzzles were placed around, each needing to be solved to get a cat toy from a shelf to move the cat from the stairs. I didn’t want to stress the player out on the first level and wanted to teach them about the core of the game, so on this level, the cat who patrols the other levels was idle on the stairs until the floor’s main puzzle was solved. Once solved, the cat would leave the stairs and head to the toy.

On the next floor, I kept an open concept but added more obstacles like furniture. I also introduced the player to rooms that needed to be opened and the patroling cat. I kept the patrol route to a simple circle so the player wouldn’t be overwhelmed having to learn how to open doors, but kept the larger portion of the route nearest the floor solution to give the player a challenge later in the level. To get to the second floor, the player had to retrieve a fob key on the kitchen counter for a baby gate that was locked and blocking the stairs.

On the next level, the open space was tighter with a more enclosed patrol route and several doors. On this floor, the player learned they needed another fob from their tech-savvy human that was left in the attic while they were playing. The player had to activate a drone by finding its controller in the parent’s room, which would have unlocked the attic.

The attic was the tightest space and had little room to hide from the cat but the puzzle here was kept simple to make up for the difficulty of the last floor but still be challenging.

Scattered throughout the house were collectable bunny plushies that unlocked various skins for the main character. Each required its own small puzzle.

The game took me 3 months to create while juggling school, work, and projects I volunteered on. Every asset both 3D and 2D was created by me. I built the game in Unreal 4 using Unreal’s node-based programming.