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How Hop, Bunny, Hop! became the wonderful Doodle Jump

Thankfully Lima Sky put the rabbit back in the box

How Hop, Bunny, Hop! became the wonderful Doodle Jump
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| Doodle Jump

The Beatles were originally The Quarrymen, while The Rolling Stones were Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

Not quite on the same scale perhaps, but do you think the perfectly-formed slice of bite-sized fun that is Doodle Jump would have been as successful if it had been called Hop, Bunny, Hop?

Actually we're being slightly disingenuous, but according to brothers Igor and Marko Pusenjak (Lima Sky) who made the game that's where the hopping gameplay came from.

"The game engine was done fairly quickly, but we had trouble getting the graphics to look right. Frustrated, we decided to take a little break from it," recalls Igor, in our Bouncing ever upwards: The making of Doodle Jump article over on PocketGamer.biz.

"When we came back to pick up where we had left off the Hop, Bunny, Hop! project, we realised we preferred the pencil-drawn sketches to the art we had, and then it hit us - we should just make this game using the hand-drawn style."

Another significant thing was Doodle Jump was the first game to implement in-game real-time score markers, so you could see how high other players had jumped.

"I started devising this complicated scheme where if a black hole sucked you in, you would be spat out at another (random) player's screen," says Igor. "It sounded cool, but it was a mess. Marko suggested the score markers."

You can read the full article over on PocketGamer.biz.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.