Catopia is the first digital game I worked on! During the process, I learned a great deal about modeling systems, using Unity, and generating digital assets.
In particular, Unity had a steeper learning curve than expected. I found that Youtube tutorials were the quickest way to pick up the basics. The most tricky part for me was memorizing all the type interfaces that they have in C# (such as draggable, etc.). There are many quirks with the software too that at least to a beginner seem to be unnecessarily confusing, such as creating a new layer and then forgetting to add the current object to that layer, etc. Overall, though, I found the Unity editor relatively fast and intuitive. I still found it difficult to contribute to complex game logic, but I was happy to contribute the initial draft of the “befriending” screen and the splash screen. It was also incredibly fun to work with digital assets Cole drew for our project. There’s nothing like the feeling of putting in a fresh amazing asset!
I found devising the system for P3 uniquely difficult compared to my P1 experience (where we also made a system). In P1, we directly modeled our system off coral reefs, and so that was a useful constraint to bound the parameters of the game. On the other hand, during P3, our system is loosely based off other strategy games like Civ 5, but we rethought the mechanics of the system to put it in the context of a cat game. It took a good deal of iteration to reach the final hunting, training, and befriending system that we converged on. The paper prototyping here was useful to perfect the mechanics before converting to digital, which is a much harder process than I expected.
I look forward to using Unity more in the future — now that I’ve contributed to a 2D game, perhaps I can try a 3D game next!
