Working on Catopia has been the most satisfying experience of my time in this class! I say this because I feel that as a team, we gave everything we had to make something we were proud of. We complemented each other extremely well, with each of us leaning greatly on our strengths! We committed to challenging ourselves with the steep Unity learning curve and to only stop iterating once we were satisfied with our system and core game loop. While this meant spending more time than I had previously anticipated with this project, I feel it made me realize just how passionate I truly am for Game Design. Hours seemed to disappear when coding the game in long discord calls: a feeling I don’t think I can say about work in many other classes here at Stanford.
Throughout development, it was clear that Catopia was becoming more of an initial slice of our game compared to its complete experience. Our scope and vision was perhaps too ambitious, yet we wanted to ensure that the mechanics of our system worked well together and produced something fun! And, I think we achieved that. In the game, cats have three different attributes and must eat food every day. Meanwhile, food can also be used to train cats (which increase their stats). But, if food ever runs out, the game instantly ends. At the same time, cats can hunt to gather more food (yet hunting cats can’t do anything else to improve the colony). Your colony of cats must expand by befriending enemy cats. This means cats need to be strong enough to do so. And, just to add one more layer of complexity to our system, Some cats have special abilities which synergize with the way you manage your colony. For example, a cat might become stronger if they know that other cats are hunting. Wow… that was a lot.
I find that the sort of fun/play that the game affords comes precisely from the slightly more intricate system that we were able to put together! All of these moving parts are somehow very related to each other when playing the game. So, at a technical level, the main type of fun comes with the challenge to manage resources within your colony. It also arises from this quite unconventional mashup of several games: taking some rogue-like and sim elements and putting them in a cozy game! Speaking of cozy games, one could argue our game also plays a lot with Sensation as a type of fun. Similar to Neko Atsume, I find there’s a lot of pleasure in just observing cats move around and collecting cute cats with cute names (shoutout Cole for the pixel art, and Caleb Cuddlebug for being a cute cat). In future iterations, I’d love to expand on fantasy and narrative aspects of our cat-infested world’s lore.
Our ecosystem is also pretty abstract. We wanted to focus on cat colonies, but we also wanted to have a positive message regarding their expansion. Thus, we can still highlight the intricate give and take that arises within any society with limited resources, but also provide an alternative way of thinking about domination: where cat’s can befriend each other in more non-violent ways! (On that note, for P4, we want to change our ‘strength’ scores to ‘charisma’ so as to be more in line with our message!) Obviously it’s a bit hard to watch others play a game that isn’t at all complete. But, when letting go of that ego, it was surprising to see just how much feedback and iteration we gained from each playtest. Mainly, the most revealing playtests came from realizing we were too stuck thinking about our systems that we had forgotten about the gameplay itself. This was a pivotal moment that fundamentally changed how we approached the game design of Catopia onwards.
Creating the systems and gameplay of Catopia was truly a joy, and perhaps where I find most pleasure and purpose when it comes to game design. I am immensely proud of the blueprint we laid out throughout this project. Using notion boards, discussing abstract classes, building event managers and game state singletons in Unity just made me feel so good about how far we came as a team!
Sorry about my ramblings, I could go on about Catopia forever…This game just makes me realise how much I truly enjoy game design both academically and (hopefully, in some day) professionally too!
