The Wright Cat's Tale
The Wright Cat's Tale is my 2nd year project. I worked with two others to create it. I focused mainly on the level design of this game as that is the part I was really interested in. After some time I realised I needed to have some sort of difficulty wave. My intention was that it would have some easier parts and some parts harder. This ranged from having to fight more enemies but also combining parkour types.
The finished product doesn't exactly do this very well in its not-so-polished state. But it was really useful to learn about these types of ideas and systems used when designing a level.
01
Ideation
The initial idea behind this project was to have a Cat with a hammer. From there we worked out we wanted to have attacks inspired by the cat using the weight of the hammer for attacks. We designed several attacks but only had time to implement one design in the end. The idea of the cat came from myself and one of the other developers as we are both cat enthusiasts.​
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02
Level Design
The ​level design was a challenge. I started with wanting to use lots of height and parkour so we could show off the cat. But when it came to implementing this it wasn't very fun with the state of the raw mechanics at the time. So I tried using more of our other mechanics like falling platforms as well as our new nail throw mechanic. The nail throw would have the player throw a nail and when it hits a log, the player can jump on the nail and then jump off. Combining this with our combat system I managed to make some variations in the difficulty.
The level was designed in a few segments. Designing in sections made it easier to distinguish the level of difficulty and variation. But also to help with balancing the overall game. It meant I could easily move parts of the level around and it would still fit nicely together.
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03
Creation
Over the 11 weeks we spent making the game we made this vertical slice. The art consists of the 3d modelled cat with animations, the hammer and the background. Learning to use some level of GitHub and version control. ​
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04
Challenges
The creation of the project went ok but we did have some technical challenges with making the mechanics. For example the way I designed the level in Unity was not very solid. So the player could fall through the ground quite easily if you dashed through it, or just jumped up and fell down too quickly. The ideas of the game were fun to work one though and it was great to make a game based around cats.
