Out of all the projects from this quarter, this one was definitely my most anticipated. I love games with elegant mechanics and interlocking systems, such as Downwell or Slay the Spire, where every design decision serves multiple roles.
That’s why I’m really proud of what we created for P3. We ended up making a pseudo-roguelike cat colony sim, a fairly unconventional genre mashup, and we pooled our talents across art, programming, design, balance, and fun to create something polished and unique. For instance, Pedro and I have a lot of experience with asymmetric, exponentially scaling powerups through games like Balatro, which fed into our ideas and design. Melissa, with her comprehensive Unity experience, kept us in check with a lot of Unity dos and don’ts, like when to use scriptable objects or prefabs. Cole also had Unity experience, as well as experience making pixel art, meaning our art pipeline was fairly seamless.
One of the most fun and simultaneously most promising design spaces we explored and plan to explore further in P4 is synergy. Early on we came up with the ideas of cats having special strengths or attributes that allowed cats to work together to achieve a shared goal. This culminated in abilities that comboed well together, like cats that increase food gain when hunting, while also having cats that increase stats when other members of their colony are hunting. It was satisfying to see how the more dopamine, number-go-up mechanics were still able to be tied into our theme of cat camaraderie.
