Bad Hare Day
Concept
The world is a wheel-shaped hellscape with several layers.
You switch between walking on the floor and in the ceiling, making your way through a gravity-based puzzle.
To your aid, you have gravity-shifting objects and unlockable powers.
Your goal is to collect enough papal keys to get out of Hell. Good luck
Info
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Tools: Git
Dev Time: 4 weeks
Team: 3 designers, 3 artists, 3 programmers
Restrictions: 10 min play
My Contribution
System
Design
Project Management
Level
Design
Pre-Production
During pre-production and paper prototyping this game, we focused on creating puzzle elements that would utilize both gravity abilities, and the circular world.
We figured out sizes for everything, building pieces, and how far the player should be able to jump and move, so level designers and 3D artists could start working quickly thereafter.
Gravity System
Designing the physics
Gravity in Bad Hare Day is personal and bipolar, in a 2D world. It means that every object has its own gravity alignment, either gravitating outwards or inwards (towards the level's core). This gave us the ability to create diverse puzzles that need several steps to solve, while simple enough to wrap your head around.
Scrapped ideas:
- Global Gravity (when gravity shifts, all actors shift)
- Local Gravity (when gravity shifts, all actors on your layer shift)
- 3D world, over the shoulder camera
- Jumping from wheel to wheel
Video: Scrapped 3D rotating world
Video: Accepted 2D rotating world
Puzzle Design
Designing the Affordances
Initially, we considered giving the player the ability to reverse gravity freely, but we quickly found that the puzzles were too easy, so we restricted the usage and divided it into two categories.
The Swapping-Ability
We gave consequence to the player's actions by only letting the player affect two actors of opposite gravity, making every move count to solve the puzzle.
This part of the system, in a vacuum, also made the player's mistakes easily reversible, as there will always be the same amount of items with a specific gravitational polarity.
the Static Swapper
We still wanted that free swap, though, to teach the player how the physics work and for puzzles that needed that one-way swap.
We simply restricted it to specific places, by entering or pushing an item into the location.
This became the static swapper. It solved some of our problems, while also bringing some new challenges, as players could now get stuck in a puzzle with no way to reverse it, if the level wasn't carefully designed.
Puzzle Elements
Many elements were planned and developed, but due to the 10 min gameplay restriction, we focused on what could be introduced, taught and mastered in that time.
Gallery
