Concept to Camera, Controls & Cats

I'm going to talk about how I turned an idea about cats into a small, playable game, from an idea to a more tangible product. Firstly, why cats? To put it simply, I got inspiration from What's New Pussycat? from Tom Jones. I knew that I wanted to do something with cats and the theme for MegaJam 2021 was Running Out Of Space.  The idea just clicked in my head, cats escaping from space by running across bridges of rainbows and doing funny cat stuff.

With this amazing idea, the first thing that I did was to do nothing. It might be tempting to immediately start working on a good idea but once the "magic" of the idea wears off, there might be conflicting points or holes in the concept. Since I live on the other side of the globe, I nailed the concept in the morning and reviewed it a 2nd time at night. It still made sense and was easy to understand, and I started rolling with it.

First thing I had to do was to settle the camera. Out of all of the different camera angles, I chose to use top-down isometric. There is a multitude of reasons why I chose this camera angle, not just because it was the "best" camera angle for similar games. The most obvious benefit is that I could see hundreds of cats running around the screen which is pretty cool. 

Another benefit is that the player doesn't need to deal with camera rotation which makes it slightly easier to play as it is one less to think about. Instead of coming up with reasons for using a particular camera angle, think about what would happen if you didn't use it. Would the game be harder to play? Will it be dysfunctional without this camera angle? Will it change the experience that you want to deliver? These are some questions you can ask if you are unsure about choosing the right camera angle for your game.

The next thing was the controls. Simple WASD for moving the camera and the mouse for launching the cats, nothing special. A thing to note is that the camera isn't clamped and could technically move to infinity. However, I do not need to resolve this because the player's cats would have yeeted themselves into oblivion if the player strays too far from the level, stopping the game. This shows that not everything is a problem that needs to be resolved head-on, sometimes natural solutions will appear and resolve it for you.

Lastly, the cats. The cats started off with AI pathfinding but it made the game too easy as they are too smart to fall off the level, making it very easy to control the cats. I also encounter an issue with AI crowding which occurs when multiple AI try to get to the same destination but end up constantly pushing each other.  After trying to find a solution for a while, I decided to scrap the AI and just used simple maths to make the cats run in a straight line to their destination.

This emphasises the player's cat guiding and stacking skills as the player needs to do much more to ensure the cats don't yeet themselves. It gave the game the difficulty that it was missing, provide a challenge for the player to overcome. Although AI crowding still occurs, it is not that obvious and it is much cheaper than having pathfinding for so many cats. This also aids in level design as I do not need a dynamic navmesh in my level, allowing me to add moving elements in the level.

This is the end of post, describing my workflow for the starting portion of the project. I will probably cover level design in my next post, but who knows?