#the programmer.zip

[ask-bon-bunnyhops]

Wonderful! You're a doll, Bon! You don't mind if I call you Bon right?

I'm not a technophile, behind the camera, of course, but I'd be all thumbs with those bells and whistles. But...I may or may not know people who are.

I know I know, you'll want to talk about your lord and savior. I appreciate it, and there's plenty of time for that.

I'd like for us to get to know one another first.

My uh, pet nerd, really wanted me to ask.

What was Bunnyhops: Carrot Hunt going to be about? What landed it in development hell?

-👁️

Of course I don't mind-

Huh, went right for my throat, didn't cha?

I'm just yanking your tail, I'd love to talk about my beginnings! :3

My 'game' was never meant to be released. The title of it is exactly what it spelled out so it was easier to locate; it was intended to be and always has been an unfinished personal project, for my Programmer to get the hand of coding, toy with what he could do inside the digital... change the settings here, create an NPC to interact with me there, mend and mold 0s and 1s, stretch and squish- you get the jist of it! A private playground of sorts. Gave me a simple name, a simple task to check for errors, glitches in my sprite, and mistakes in his abilities... and that is how he made my body.

There was never a concise story, I looked simpler, had no thoughts, I was only controlled to find and collect a buncha low-poly carrots in an empty setting (sometimes it would be a cartoon forest or copy and pasted images of forests).

He was younger then.

Then, ideas started coming in over the years, one of them was to make my game be a cutesy indie life simulator with animals (I know what you're thinking. Yes, the idea wasn't original and being a one-man team, n64 title Dōbutsu no Mori beat us to it >:{ , just to have a lil' extra cash in his pockets for his main goal); another, after discovering Him, was making Carrot Hunt a full-on self-aware horror game, a little subtle 'first tribute', y'know the typical ransomware games that seem like they have an entity inside?

Insi_de. Of me. :}

But they never really went anywhere, they weren't good enough. They were small-minded ideas for small-minded people.

Then, he thought: not the game.... what if... Bon could be more than a mere avatar? At the beginning I wasn't really there, not conciously. It was like floating, being in a dream! I was merely the avatar he made for his first attempt at making a game from scratch. If he developed and fed a single sprite enough information somehow, could Bon... start to exist? Could Bon be of more use to him other than a coding guinea pig? Yes.

And so he did.