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Manic Mechanics

ROLE

Gameplay Designer

& Software Developer

DESCRIPTION

Chaotic time management game where you wrangle 5 cats. Keep them happy and prevent your home from going into disrepair!

RELEASE YEAR

2023

GENRE

Casual

PLATFORMS

PC

Contributions

This is a group project for my Indie Game Development module. Our team followed Agile development.

Cat Chaos is a game about preventing your army of cats from destroying your house and themselves. It is a resource management game where the core gameplay loop consists of keeping the house's health and the cats' mood from dropping to 0 before the timer runs out.

Cats can have different emotional states including content, angry, hungry, lonely and frightened. The player can perform a set of actions to counter each of the negative emotions. The cats destroy the furniture around the house if they are angry.

Design: I proposed the game concept based on a brief we were provided with. I also fleshed out most of the game mechanics in our Game Design Document and made sure all game features add to the user experience. The game has a mixture of 2D and 3D to create a unique art style which was my suggestion based on the team's skillset. I proposed a hidden mechanic which dynamically adjusts the game's difficulty depending on how well a player is doing and depends on where they currently are on the scoring system (so the 1 star section is easy, 2 star is normal and 3 star is hard mode).

Programming: I implemented the point & click character movement and the camera that follows the player room to room. I also created camera rotation that pivots around the centre of the room, but this mechanic was discarded based on playtester feedback to provide a better player experience. I also created the scoring system and game over states and set up the different menus and navigation between them.

Play game on Itch: https://dorona.itch.io/cat-chaos

TOOLSET

  • Unity

  • C#

  • Documentation tools

  • Git version control

© 2024 by LAURA V. MOLNAR

  • LinkedIn
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