Bad Hare Day

Trailer for “Bad Hare Day”, a 4 week long school project, created with Unreal 4

Team size:
9 team members, 3 designers

Project length:
4 weeks

Contribution and role:
Gameplay design, product owner, VFX

Bad Hare Day is a puzzle game created as a project at FutureGames 2020. In the game the player takes the role of a misplaced hell demon. The goal is to break free from hell through a series of puzzles were the player can shift gravity between itself and objects in the world.

Two of the requirements for the game was Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of earthly delights, an art piece with a lot of weird and twisted elements and a limited play time of 10 minutes. The painting is the biggest influence for the aesthetic of the game.

Circular world

At the start of the project me and the team focused a lot on trying to find a scope that would fit the time we’ve got and a lot of ideas where scrapped. The core idea of the game quickly became focused on the aspect of having a circular world where the player could use both the roof and floor as a playing area.

When designing the world itself a lot of testing went in to how to divide the different areas of the levels into sections to easier apply puzzle designs, decide upon the player agency and core pillars of the game.
These decisions came to shape the project throughout and we ended up with a product where the player is restricted to the use of gravity shifting with or for objects.

Description of the pic

The circular shape of the world was interesting to work with and presented a lot of vital design issues for us. Gravity did not work as intended, the player had to get feedback on two separate planes and so on. In retrospect the shape of the world created an interesting learning opportunity and the game ended up being an interesting take on a linear puzzle game.

Product owner

My main mission as a product owner in this project were to keep the communication between different fields of the development team in synch. A lot of improvised solutions and ideas became problems at certain points of development and I tried my best to keep both scope and vision.

During the project we saw a need for concept art to easier communicate different designs to the rest of the team.