Exploration · 2022
Strawberry Bunny
A personal game built in p5.js where a pink bunny travels through a series of dream-like realms, collecting strawberries as each world grows faster. What started as a way to learn creative coding without a brief grew into a full playable game with a cute little bunny.
Concept
A game born from learning by doing
I wanted to understand creative coding — how code can produce something expressive rather than just functional. But tutorials without a goal tend to stall, so I gave myself a constraint: build something someone could actually play. A game creates real pressure. It needs a character, rules, progression, and some reason to keep going.
The bunny came first. Soft, pink, slightly ridiculous — she was a deliberate departure from the abstract shapes that usually appear in generative art exercises. Building around a specific character forced decisions that a generic project wouldn't: how she moves, what she collects, what the world around her looks like when things get harder. The constraint made the project.
Game Design
Escalating difficulty through environment
Difficulty in Strawberry Bunny is communicated through the world, not through numbers or bars. Each realm shifts its color palette — pastels brighten and saturate, then deepen and fragment — as the pace of incoming strawberries increases and obstacle patterns grow less predictable. The player feels the escalation before they consciously register it.
Keeping the feedback visual meant every design decision had to carry information. Background hue signals which realm you're in. Particle density signals how close you are to the edge. The bunny's movement speed is the one mechanic that stays constant, so the environment's acceleration is always relative to something stable. That contrast is what makes the game feel fair even as it gets harder.
Visual Direction
Soft, nostalgic, pixel art
The visual language is built on deliberate softness: rounded shapes, pastel fills, a palette that feels closer to illustration than interface. That softness is not just aesthetic — it sets an expectation of gentleness that the escalating difficulty then works against. The tension between the cute surface and the actual pressure of the game is part of what makes it feel like a dream turning strange.
The bunny herself is drawn in pixel art, and imported as a sprite. I reused an old gif that I drew as a child and made her into the main character of the game.
Playthrough
Watch the game in action
A full run through the realms — collecting strawberries as the pace escalates and the environments shift. Each world has its own palette and feel, but the bunny stays constant throughout.
