xnaFan's Blog

Just finished attending Indie9000 gamejam here in Aalborg. We had a lot of fun. The theme (revealed friday evening) was Rabbits.
We were intent on making a combined "Shoot-the-little-varmints" and Tower Defense game where we would partly shoot the little rodents with a shotgun (instant gratisfaction ;-)) and partly set up traps and obstacles to keep them out of the garden.
In the end we only implemented the shoot-em-up part, but had great fun getting there.
One thing we laughed a lot about was the fact that we had to implement some censorship. We wanted the rabbits to be able to "spawn" new rabbits when amorous feelings arose. But they had very few inhibitions. To begin with we found out that they were jumping members of their own sex. While we have nothing morally against that - it didn't lead to offspring (which was our intention to begin with) so we put a stop to that.
Then we found out that they were copulating with the deceased which we also chose to stop, and finally when all was well and dandy and little rabbitcouples were having rabbit offspring we saw some deviants sexually assaulting the babies. So finally, after three "censorship IF-sentences" we got the game up and running :).

There were a lot of other very well made games and we saw our chances of winning any of the categories as very slim :).
One thing we were very happy about was making a score system to tempt the good gamers into making the game harder for themselves: We awarded the player 1 point for every kill. But if you kept shooting at the rabbitcorpse you got additional points. Two points for the next shot, then three, four, etc. for the entire two seconds before the corpse was removed from the playingfield. this makes it possible to get up around 1+2+3+.....+15+16 points if you go on a splatterspree :). This also lets the other rabbits get closer to your carrot, gives them time to make new rabbits and even more rabbits are spawned from the rabbitholes around the border of the playing board.
The judges apparently thought this was a great balancer for the game - and also liked how easy the game was to learn (and addictive - we had to wait for one of the judges to beat our highscore :)).

If you want to play the game - it's available for download here.

You need the XNA redistributable if you don't already have the XNA framework installed.

The sourcecode will be available soon, it's being beautified *G*.

Enjoy!