Author: Valeria Voronkova

Finally the game is officially ready! I have spent around 20 hours non stop connecting the scenes together, adjusting transitinos and removing the bugs which I wasn’t attentive enough to spot before. Nothing much happened to document here. It’s just long manual work which is finally over.

A couple of words on sound design. I think that there is no need for many background sounds as title music makes it all to create the right mood. And I think I’ve found the ideal one. It’s light and sad, but gives you a bittresweet feeling. The one that I had when got the message that my friend made it home safe. I was happy that all went well, but at the same time we both were sad that the situation happended and there is more time (unknown amount of time) ahead of waiting till we can meet in person.

I also added simple titles at the very eng just to make the game look finished and deliberately omitted the start screen. I felt it right to make it similar to Journey, which starts right away without explaining anything. I don’t want people feel that it is a game. It’s just a small story which you can experience without getting ready for it.

As a little conclusion so far, this project exhausted me morally and physically (night shifts are becomig a habbit now). But I can’t say enough what a big leap forward for me it was in terms of game design and technical skills. Compared to all my previous games, that had only one simple mechanic and not a hint of narrative whatsoever. Here is the list of things I learned within this project only:

Timeline

Animation triggers

SetActive (true);

Spawning object in order with one button (lists and resourses folder)

Scene transitions

Particle system

Ragdoll mechanics

Sequence puzzle

Pong (and AI)

Custom cursor

Hide cursor command

Close application command

Yes, the game is not 100% polished. Apart from ragdoll, which is still a big issue, I’d work more on background assets and animations. But I can call the game complete and totally satisfied with it. It still has to undergo playtesting ( results of which, I guess, I’ll put in the report mainly) and a bit worried if playtesters understand the story, get the message and in general if they will like the game or not. Because I’ve spent so much effort here. And how will my friend react to it, because it was made due to and partly for him. But this 2 months experience I’m not likely to forget soon.

So I invite everyone to test it out yourselves or watch a walkthrough video below. Have fun and care for your loved ones.

The final mini game is ready! And that means all part of the game are complete and ready for the final set up.

Anothe completely new mechanics for me which I called the sequence puzzle. It turned up quite easy to make. Now I know how to work with string variables, check if the input is in correct order and set up volumes for each puzzle element. That was interesting.

Also as you can see I included particle system ,which I heard of, but didn’t use much before. It was fun playing with its properties.

And again the game required more animation drawing, but I’m happy with the result. By this point I already changed the cursor for a custom one for narrative purposes.

Now I can connect all the parts into one game and hopefully I’ll be done with the project in a couple of days. Can’t wait!

It’s time to learn something new again! For the ball scene I wanted to make the player play with the cat to entertain him a little bit and raise up his spirits. And I had a thought that Pong-like mechanics would fit quite well here. I have spent the whole day following a tutorial, but managed to recreate it successfully. It even has simple AI , which I never thought I’d be capable to implement. But it works and works smoothly. I only have to create additional asset to make the AI paddle look like a cat.

The rest of the scene is also good to go

And I created some more animation for the cut-scene right after this part of the game. Pretty much like it. I never thought I’ll need animation courses I took quite some years ago by this point. But having to work so much with it for this project I can feel the improvement already.

One more mini game to build and I can finally compile all the parts into one game. The ending is near and I’m happy about that, because the work is becoming exhausing. But I want my holidays, so going on.

I’m proceeding well enough with game development. So far I have completed the camp scene and a mini game attached to it. At this poit I’ve beem working very much time with unity animation system, learned to use bools and triggers as well as change sprites on interaction. Who knew that such small interactions with little coding can work quite well, when being compiled in a scene.

Sometimes funny bloopers happen, which give you a good laugh. Especially when you forget to set ridgid body to a kinematic mode =)

Also as you can spot, I’ve learned another new feature which is camera following the character. I can even control the offset borders, which makes it quite handy. It’s a Mario style camera follow when the character is pushing the bounds. I’ve never done that before, but like the result very much. It looks like a real game now.

I also started to set up the first part with the cat just running. Nothing much to show, it’s just running along the snow desert, I’ve just added landscape assets and a trigger to launch the cut-scene with the freight train. Two locations of the second part with cat walking are ready as well. The cat prefab was ready beforehand, so for now I have only one scene to build with mini game and related cut-scene, create one more game for the final part and compile all that together with scene transitions.

We have finally submitted collab project which means I can fully focus on the game. After ragdoll issues I wanted to take it a bit easy and make the parts I’m sure about and which won’t require long hours of coding or setting issues.

Though in the shield game I used a familiar mechanics, similar to the one I used in the first game with cats attacking a plant, I added and practiced a new feature for me, which is life count. After bats hit the cat 3 times, the game is relodaded. Player has to keep them away for 30 seconds and the game will proceed.

Other simple cut-scenes such as bus travel was easy as well and doesn’t need much description.

Finally I came up with and updated game scheme and is certain about the connections between scenes and locations.

First of all the game consists of 5 locations, each of them has corresponding symol, mini game and cut-scene attached to it. The game plays with the direction the cat is moving towards in the game. The idea is that at the very beginning we don’t know, where the cat is heading to. On default we assume that he’s going somewhere from starting point to his goal. But as the game proceeds and we see more and more cut-scenes, we realize that locations that we see there are going in reverse order in the game. Which means that the cat is actually not moving forward, but going back.

I’m trying to do a bit of environmental storytelling here as in cut-scenes the locations look more happy and lively (because the cat feels happy in anticipation of a long awaited meeting), while in the game they look more abandoned and lonely to share the disappointed feelings. Especially it will be seen in the camp location as an example.

Arrows in the upper part show my struggles to choose the order of locations. At some point I got lost in them, so that even now I can’t already describe precisely what I was thinking about at the moment and why they ended up in such an order. But this wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to mix and distribute games and cut-scenes along the game. As you can see on the upper scheme, cut-scenes should tell the actual (back)story – the things that happened before the game started and contains character’s motives together with the correct order of locations.

The tricky part was that locations in cut-scenes must appear before the character actually reaches them. Otherwise the player won’t get the “reverse order and going back” thing. So at least one cut-scene needs to be played ahead of the first mini game. Because I initially thought that cut-scenes will be something like a reward for winning and should be related to the actions (or theme) in mini game. In the first part of the game you can see that the first cut-scene (marked in clowdy bubble) will just spawn on trigger without any additional interation. It was needed just to break this initial order and thematic connection between cut-scene and corresponding mini game.

But by doing that I ran into another problem: the reason of mini games being there. I unerstand that initially the games are there just to include some intercation into the story. And with breaking connection between game and cut-scene I have lost the reason of mini games to be present. Untill I came up with the solution that has put all the puzzle pieces together. Instead of connecting them to cut-scenes, I’ll connect them to locations. Since the whole intention of the game is to make the player care for the cat, I’ll adjust the games, so that as the result of playing them, you help the cat to move to another location. For example, in the train location cat spots an open carriage where he stays for some time to rest and sleep. The player in the meantime must scare away bad dreams (bats) to let him rest somehow.

Since I already know the climax scene, I want to create a little plot twist by creating custom cursor in the shape of the sparkle in the ending to hint on that all this time it was us – cat’s friend, who guided and helped him all along the trip.

So having decided all that, I’m fully entering the development step and now it’s more about technical implementation. Some changes are possible, of course, in case I don’t manage to implement something physically.