Artist statement

The ecosystem of Catopia is a play on the traditional strategy ecosystem present in games such as Civ 5, but with a twist: We remove the themes of colonization and violence, and replace them with a more wholesome message to befriend all the cats in the land. 

To prevail, players must choose to allocate their individual cats, each of which has their own stats such as health and befriending ability, to hunt, train, or befriend. A successful befriending leads to other cats joining the herd. Throughout the game, the player can note their progress by clicking on the minimap on the top left. Our goal with this game is to accurately model this traditional genre of strategy game, subvert it by questioning whether it needs to be necessarily violent and instead focus on befriending, and of course overwhelm with cuteness through lovingly designed cat avatars.

Game Link

https://melissaran.itch.io/catopia

password : cat

NOTE: the one thing that players don’t understand is that you must fill up the Befriend area in order to progress the game, and enable the “New Day” button.

Final concept map

History Versions of Game: 

In our first paper prototype, instead of befriending cats, you would need two cats to “reproduce” to gain more cats. We also started by giving the player exactly two cats and two food. In the first version of our game, there were no abilities. When there was not enough food to feed a cat, you needed to choose which one would die off. During our first playtest using this design, a player mentioned using a cat solely to reproduce, not investing in training their health or hunting. So, we rethought the values embedded in our design.

We replaced “Reproduce” with “Battle,” and started to implement the game in Unity. As we developed, we came up with the idea of “abilities,” where each cat would have conditions that gave it a stat boost when fulfilled, such as “I fight for my friends,” in which a cat becomes stronger in battle when accompanied by at least one other cat. Abilities made choices more complex, and allowed cats to interact with one another; A theme of camaraderie and friendship emerged. Riding this wave, we changed the consequences of being unable to feed all cats: game over. The value behind this choice was communion, “all for one” if you will.

After our first digital playtest, we learned that players found joy in the cats personal lives, in rest and in activity. We continued pursing peaceful and wholesome values by rebranding “Battle” as “Befriend.” We discussed replacing strength with charisma. We also discussed renaming “battle” to “arm wrestle.” We created additional space for interesting choices by allowing the user to choose one cat after a “befriend,” and allowing them to choose one cat to save after a game over.

Digital Playtest 1

This was our first digital playtest. The game was in a state where you could play it, but rules and underlying logic had to be explained by one of us. Our playtester was a fellow classmate, Jennifer,

What went well:

• Liked that the cats had names, stats, and abilities that were coherent and created a personality.
• Laughed at cats!
• Was getting into the flow of balancing hunting, consumption, and training — saw the relationship.
• Had fun, in a “mathy” way.
• Enjoyed dragging cats around, thought they were cute
• Wondered what would happen if they left cats unbusy at home. Laughed when an at-home event caused two cats to bond and increase their Health stat. Made a comment about resting and mental health!

What went less well:

• Due to a bug, did not get to fully experience loop because new cats were never added in this run.
• Confused about when the game ends, how to win, and what the overall goal was (besides never die)
• Confused about the “new day” button, and why pressing “new day resets everything and causes food consumption.
• Unclear naming/ UI indicators.

What we changed and why:

• Implemented map feature which drives progression though game, allowing players to see how to “win”
• Reworked our UI and metaphors, in order to help player understand the game.
• Thought about ways to amplify the emerging values of friendship, health, rest, and communion that are created by… abilities (for example, cats getting stronger when hunting with friends,) events (cats becoming healthier if given free time) and other mechanics.

Digital Playtest 2

A short playtest with Amy.

• “It feels like a cat in that its running away from me — i want to read the information!!”
• Cut short by a bug!
• Unclear what the goal was
• Needs instructions

What changed between Playtest 2 and 3

• Added written tutorial
• Improved UI significantly. Made Cat UI more readable because cats were running from Amy!
  • Added ability indicator
  • No more white blocks for befriend slots
  • No more white block that just says “Map” – actual map icon
  • Indicators for imminent starvation
  • More readable text, slower cats.
• Implemented Befriend
  • Gave reason for player to train and buff health/strength
• Implement map/ progress
• You can now lose the game by starving or by losing a befriend

Digital Playtest 3

Who: Jenny, casual/social gamer. (Not really a gamer) Bad at resource management.

What went well:

• Laughed at sunset event. “Okay you two can watch the sunset.” Laughed at large bread bug. “Bluestar is useless. Me too”
• Thought hard when choosing cats after winning battles
• Achieved +44 food in one day by stacking 3x cats with “Three Musketeers” ability
  • “That means now I can actually train people”
  • “Now we will have constant food production “
  • “Oh my god we have so much food”
• Made it through to the end of the game.

What went less well:

• Didn’t die. Didn’t get to see dying mechanic.
• Didn’t feel too challenged
• Rarely trained cats
• “IDK how to feel about having to befriend everyday. Kind of like level capping, but would have enjoyed simply hoarding resources and more cats.”

Neutral feedback:

• “I vibe with this because its supposed to be easy based on how cute it is.”

Digital Playtest 4

Who: Jace used to be into more fps games enjoy puzzle and strategy. I would say they’re a gamer. Bad at reading. Jace was “playing to loose” and tried to break our game.

What went well:

• Tried to die early on. After discovering the mechanic in which you can keep a single cat upon restarting, they made it their goal to train a cat to be infinitely buff by training and dying repeatedly.
  • When they discovered that stats carried over with death, they said “yeahhhh.”
• Wants to know what happens when/ if you can kill a cat
• Always takes the risky option when events pop up.
• Was having too much fun
• Enjoyed little guys

What went less well:

• When the cats are at the top of the box you can’t read their stats
  • If mouse is at top half of screen, stats should be displayed below cat. If mouse is at bottom half screen, stats should be displayed above cat.
• It should be a bit harder
• Easy to not train any cat, and just bring in more cats that are better equipped
• Didn’t feel like theres a very strong goal. Would be fun to see stats at end of game. Try to take over human civilization. Limited amount of days + goal makes sense, unlimited + resource hoarding/ number go up makes sense.
• Didn’t figure out that New Day activates when cats pare placed in Befriend
  • UX issue – need to give tooltip when hovering over Befriend area or New Day button

General thoughts after playtests

It was fun to see people “play” with our system in a literal sense, trying to discover all the mechanics and take advantage of them. We were impressed that the game did not bug out at any point so far.

What we want to change based on these two playtests:

• Players are still unclear about their objective.
  • For instance, players are unaware that the capacity of the befriend area should be full before the New Day button can be clicked.
  • The overarching goal of “Expanding the Map” is still somewhat nebulous, even though it was outlined in the tutorial
    • To fix this, we can emphasize through tooltips that expanding your colony through befriending is your primary goal.
• Ability that uses train, to make train a more interesting option
• More abilities, also abilities for enemies (that interact with your placement of cat)
  • We can have abilities that buff adjacent cats during battle, or nerf enemy cats.
  • Enemy cats could be able to do the same to us!
• More difficulty. How?
  • Make difficulty ramp more significantly (cats near final levels should have insane stats!)
  • Make training more vital, which means higher food consumption and less cats for hunting.
  • Make recruitment cost more food, which makes it harder to keep consumption under control
• More levels so people can keep playing
  • Increasing the number of levels while also giving each level a theme (recruited cats are city/desert/aquatic themed) could really give the player a sense of conquering a world.
• They suggested that random events could be to ramp up difficulty.

Other Notes

We are aware it might seem like we just replaced all occurrences of “Battle” with “Befriend” – because we did! To make this shift in tone towards nonviolence more convincing in P4, we plan to contextualize battles in terms of more friendly disputes, like cat arm wrestling or something similar, kind of how Super Smash Brothers was named that way to make the fighting between mascot characters more familial and friendly.