Dust Bunny (2D Adventure Game)

Project Introduction

DustBunny is a 2D story-telling game, in which the player will play the role of a character who was drawn and designed by a game designer on his log book and magically becomes alive.

Without being directly narrated, players will witness and feel the story behind the scenes by exploring the words, drawings, and notes that the designer wrote in his logbook.

What does the game focus on?

Non-linear and implicit storytelling

By giving certain content and interactions, we wanted our players to feel and resonate with the game. By having a glimpse of the game designer’s life through the words and notes he left in his log book, each player should have their own explanation of the story in their own words.

Hand-painted style

Since the game world is a game designer's logbook, the aesthetics of the game mainly focus on all kinds of hand painting styles.

Game Development

Programming and Interaction Design

Since the main character is described as a cloud of dust in the back settings, the way for the character to move is to blow a wind towards a direction to give itself a force towards the opposite direction.

To let players get familiar with the interactions, we added some visual support such as when the character’s ability to blow is in cool-down, it will close the eyes.

World Building and Challenge Design

As mentioned above, to better fulfill the background story, the whole world was drawn by hands in Procreate. To better guide the player to explore through the game world, the game map is designed to have certain borders to lead players to explore next.

Based on the interaction design, all the challenges design are related to the character’s ability to move/blow. For example, when the character is exposed to the sunshine for too long, it will gradually lose its ability to move and finally die out.

Map Design

Promo Poster Design

User Test

After having several discussions and interviews with our users, there are several issues we found in our game that needed further polishing.

• Most players can not clearly figure out the way to control the character in the very first period of time. This always decreases the players’ passion to continue playing.

• There are no clear motivations for players to explore the game world.

Future Development

We plan to rebuild the game map and add a specific mainline task to lead players to explore the world and, at the same time, keep the non-linear and implicit way of storytelling.

Add more interactions and abilities to the character.

We plan to re-design the character control or set up a start stage to teach players the way of interaction before the main experience.