Whack-a-rabbit

Heyo! This is Fredrik from Pugstorm.

Last week, Julian gave us some insights into the art-making process of Radical Rabbit Stew. Today, I’ll write a little about making two of the game’s main mechanics: ‘propelling’ and ‘whacking’ —two seemingly straightforward mechanics that took a lot of sweat and tears to get right.

As some of you may know, in Radical Rabbit Stew, the main goal is to whack rabbits with different spoons, and send them off diving into metallic pots. When a rabbit is bopped in this fashion, it enters a “propelled (flying) state”, making it tumble off in a direction until it hits another object. If it collides with a pot, it enters it, and is then sent off into space! A stage is completed once all pots have been filled.

These seemingly simple rules make for some interesting and complex interactions that you can explore in the game’s different worlds. (There’s also an in-game editor that you can use to cook up your own delicious and chaotic rabbit stew nightmares!)

To enhance the game further, we sprinkled it with many different objects (e.g., springs, crock pots, etc) that affect and interact with propelled objects in various ways. Most combinations of these interactions had to be considered carefully, and we meticulously tweaked them to give the player a creative experience with tons of emergent gameplay and possibilities to explore!

In the early days of making the game, we fiddled with a few proprietary physics engines to handle collisions (there were no existing rabbit physics ™ engines that we could use). This, however, turned out to be a highly unstable (and unfruitful) nightmare. Thus, we instead started from scratch, and made our own system for handling rabbit physics ™. This allowed us to have fine-grained control over how collisions behave, which became more-and-more important as the development of the game progressed.

In the end, we believe that the result of taking this approach is quite amazing, and we are particularly fond of the game’s super cool chain reactions. For these reasons, we are extremely happy that we dared taking this approach to making the game—even though it added quite a few difficult hurdles that we had to overcome.

There’s of course quite a few ingredients (and more technical details) that go into making a rabbit physics™ system like ours, so please let us know if you are interested in knowing more by dropping us a tweet or a message. 😄

With that said, if you want to have a real taste of Radical Rabbit Stew, make sure to Wishlist the game now buy the game when it is released next month.