It’s rare for indie games to get as much attention as Bunhouse before release but Reky Studios has shown they can personally program that aww-worthy exception. It was fully funded in five days on Kickstarter while raising $36,691 and now it’s going viral on Twitter once more ahead of its release.
Bunhouse is a cute couch co-op greenhouse management where players get to play as the bunnies themselves! It has an Animal Crossing vibe with even more adorable added on top and looks like it will be a great game for casual gamers and management moguls alike. It features local co-hop (get it?) play and it will be possible to play with friends online through Steam’s plat together feature.
A Tweet promoting the game has already received over 29.8k retweets, 1.6k comments, and a whopping 61k likes. With its immense popularity, we reached out to talk with Patrick Gauthier, the sole developer at Reky Studios, to talk about the game, its creation, and more.
The story behind the creation of Bunhouse is almost as adorable as the game itself. Gauthier told us about how it started as a passion project for his wife.
“My wife is obsessed with plants. Our apartment is absolutely filled with them. Her dream is to own a greenhouse but, as someone who has chosen less-than lucrative career paths (math teacher at a Catholic high school and then youth minister), we simply couldn’t afford a place where we could have a greenhouse.
So I decided that my mini project was going to be a fun game I could play with my wife to fulfill that dream, at least in a small way. My wife also happens to love bunnies and thinks they are the most adorable creature on God’s green earth. And so Bunhouse was born… a cute silly game for my wife where we could play as bunnies taking care of her dream greenhouse.”
After his wife caught him creating the game, Gauthier decided to try and bring the game to Kickstarter for everyone to enjoy. From there, it quickly became something more than he ever could have imagined.
“So I decided that my mini project was going to be a fun game I could play with my wife to fulfill that dream, at least in a small way. My wife also happens to love bunnies and thinks they are the most adorable creature on God’s green earth. And so Bunhouse was born… a cute silly game for my wife where we could play as bunnies taking care of her dream greenhouse. I added fishing, bunny yoga, and some other miscellaneous things as well.
And so, a game that originally started as a fun silly project for my wife has turned into my full time job!”
So how does Gauthier feel about their new full-time developing gig?
“It’s been an absolutely marvelous journey and the community has been so wonderfully receptive of all the cute buns. Between music, modeling, animating, texturing, programming, sound design, playtesting, bug fixing, marketing, managing a community, and doing other human things as well, being a solo developer is not easy. You have to be a jack of all trades and you have to know what things are worth adding/fixing/tweaking, because there simply isn’t enough time in the day to do everything.
But being able to be my own boss, engage with a community, help charity, and, penultimately, make my wife happy, is well worth the hard work!”
Bunhouse will be available on Steam on October 19th with a Nintendo Switch version planned to come out sometime next year. You can wishlist the game here.
