Hi everyone!! I've been chipping away at bugs here and there, and I've got enough for a full patch now. V.1.6 is LIVE!!

I didn't do a good job of keeping track of what I did and didn't fix, this time...but a lot of things that people had problems with should be fixed.

Also - if you haven't picked up the game yet, it's 20% OFF THIS WEEK!!! WOW!!!!! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!!

If you HAVE picked up the game, and if you've played it...so have I!! Finally. It only took three months after the damn thing released (I needed a break...)

I've written a brief postmortem about my feelings for You Are NOT Bunnygirl below. If you're interested in reading, please be aware that it contains spoilers for the full game.

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The first idea I had for a story about a robot bunny was a Five Nights at Freddy's 2 fanfiction which I never wrote, drew, or published. I was 16 years old.

Now, 12 years later, I have developed and released a video game about a robot bunnygirl which bears almost no resemblance to its original incarnation, conceived over a decade ago.

In those 12 years, I have made countless friends, attended and graduated college, learned to play guitar, learned to program, learned to draw, lived off of minimum wage and blood and grit and sweat, fallen in and out of love, written short stories, written one or two scrapped novels, made a handful of video games, and written and recorded at least several dozen songs.

Writing a postmortem about You Are NOT Bunnygirl feels impossible because I no longer recognize the person who started it.

In completing the game, I was left not with a sense of accomplishment, but relief. Five and a half years is far too long a development cycle for a game like this. My philosophies and opinions of the game and its characters changed quite a bit over the last half decade, and it is a small miracle that the game feels cohesive at all.

Its design was (very obviously) inspired by UNDERTALE.

It was only later that my influences varied and my style diverged, but UNDERTALE was the first game that made me want to make games. It inspired, shocked, and captivated me like no other had. I held the game on a pedestal of absolute reverence and declared that I would not rest until I had made something I could feel proud of - a promise which I fulfilled to its bitter end. I take no pride in the sleepless nights and weekends that I spent developing and completing You Are NOT Bunnygirl. Five and a half years is far, far too long to make a game like this.

But I wanted to make this story.

I'm the type of person where if I don't make the things I want to, I'll go crazy. And sometimes I'll go crazy anyways.

To start, I wanted to make a game that talked about blacks and whites. In an increasingly divided and violent world, moral grays are becoming less useful all the while. Everyone seems to be choosing one side or another. Everyone seems willing to pull one trigger or another.

I wanted to make a game about pulling a trigger and being okay with that.

Video games have always been weird about that sort of thing. The player usually controls a character, and that character must be appealing or relatable to the player in some way. That means they aren’t allowed to do anything too evil or repulsive. The enemies they kill must be mindless monsters, and the worlds they raze must be hellscapes and dungeons. I have plenty of love for games like that. But they don’t represent the full range of the human experience. I am, by and large, most interested in writing stories that are about underrepresented factions.

Protagonists who do awful things are more common in traditional art forms (novels, movies), because there is a greater separation between the audience and the art. But in a video game, we directly control our vessels. There is an unavoidable, even intimate connection. Therefore, questions of moral greyness must be explored with extreme caution, or else they might make the player feel bad in a way that could ruin the experience.

So, naturally, I did the complete opposite and tried to write a story about people who do awful things for selfish reasons.

And then I said it was okay to do that.

Did I achieve my goal? I think so. Now that the game has been out for a few months, I've seen a lot of discussion about the extremity of the main character’s actions from people who loved or hated the game alike, and I think it's interesting that that aspect of the game made such a strong impression on people on both ends of the spectrum. I'm glad that it did.

The black and white morality of YANB is intended to be a commentary of the increasingly absurd times we are living in, as well as an inversion of the numerous morally grey or choice-filled RPGs that have grown popular in indie spaces for the last 10+ years. YANB’s pretension, amateurish characters, and the lack of any kind of middle ground from the world, the protagonists, or the antagonists (and the fact that so many characters exhibit moral compasses in spite of how irrelevant they are in the face of the world/situations presented by the game) is kind of the point. Would it really be possible to convince somebody like the Bunnygirl in the Motherboard of peace if we had talked for longer? What about Gatekeeper? What about Wilhelm?

What about the actual world leaders and political systems whom we live under, outside of the game and in the real world?

Sometimes, the best we can hope for is our own, personal happiness, and we must find a way to accept that that is enough. To live is to hold the selfish belief that your life is worth living. That is what I wanted to say.

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So, what do I think of the actual game?

It's good! I'd give it a 7.5/10.

That's just my opinion, though.

The art is solid, and the music is good.

The battle system is extremely good, but the game never pushes it to its limit, which feels like a huge missed opportunity.

The game also lacks quality of life in some places, which is pretty annoying. There should really be some kind of tutorial for the battle system. Some of the puzzles should also be explained better, especially the ones in the Motherboard. Actually, the Motherboard feels weak overall, even if it is an effective narrative conclusion.

The story is good, and occasionally great! In playing the full game, I am particularly fond of its structure. The first area (Heap) doesn't have any large narrative hooks and instead gives the player room to familiarize themselves with the battle system, which is complex enough that it requires most of their attention. The middle scripts of the game grow louder as the player settles into the gameplay. Toll Bot's death is the best narrative moment in the entire game.

RE: Characters, I really think I knocked it out of the park with Elaine. She’s so easy to write and she’s just delightful whenever she’s onscreen - and she is also the compass that everything in You Are NOT Bunnygirl follows. Look at what Elaine is doing at literally any point of the story, and you will find what that part of the story is trying to say.

However, some of the characters are weak; Maid Bot and Eddie come to mind (Maid Bot is too similar to the Bunnygirl in the Motherboard…) In fact, the execution of Eddie as a character is one of my greatest regrets. In a story about living one's own life, with undercurrents of racism and classism through its depictions of robots and androids, the one robot member of the party should have played a greater role in its story.

But overall, yes, a 7.5/10. I did a good job.

Thank god, thank god.

I did a good job.

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But what’s NEXT?????

Well, I intend to support You Are NOT Bunnygirl in the future post-launch. That’s about all I can say at the moment.

Beyond that, You Are NOT Bunnygirl definitely won’t be the last game that I make. And my next game DEFINITELY won’t take half a decade.

But before that, I’m going to take a nice, long break…

You can keep up with my exploits at the YANB community Discord or my YouTube channel. If you liked the vocal track from the game’s credits, I have a lot more of that on my YouTube channel - and a lot more of it on the way, too!

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@justjordanp

Discord:
https://t.co/o60LjOziIK

Until next time, have a good one!

-Jordan

Business inquiries:
[email protected]