Development Overview

I'm making a 2D platformer game using my old friend, Meowmeow, as the main character, creating a new mini game for the Meowmeow Series. The whole idea is turning the player into a naughty cat, whose only purpose is to mess up the whole place by pooping everywhere. As the designer, my ultimate purpose is to make a funny charming little game (some players said it's a bit tense though...) Overally, the development process is not as relaxed as the game itself, I overcame many chanllenges and pushed my limit a lot. The detailed document is written below.

Playtesting Feedback

Play testers: Yifan, Jeffery, Jackson and Zi (my dear roommate)

Feedbacks:

• Players can jump in two stages
• The enemy cannot leave the ground
• Setting of conditions for completion (including wins and losses)
• More ways to hide from your master
• The ejection function
• Add sound effects
• To ward off a host
• Add more mobile platforms
• Cat food (ammo supply) automatically recharges
• Love will not disappear when you encounter it at full health

Development Docs

From a design process perspective, the concept from the beginning of the game and the design of the entire game mechanics didn't go so well. At first I only thought of the main character of the game, which was my cat Meowmeow, whose attacking way was to poop everywhere. Then, for visual design and animation editing, it was relatively smooth. I used real photos of my cats as sprite sheets and designed some funny animations. But when it came to the most critical core parts of the game, how to score points and how to keep players from getting bored, it took me a long time to figure it out. After getting feedback from players during a few playtests, I decided to give cats a more challenging way to score. Then I encountered a lot of programming and Unity development challenges, including the completion of some mechanics such as auto-fill dot cat food placement, platform arrangement, etc. One of the things that impressed me the most, and took me the most time, was the level design.

When designing levels with different difficulties, I made a lot of adjustments to match the varying difficulty. The first is the size of the map. In a simple level, the map is small, so it's easy for the player to get resupplied with bullets. In the more difficult levels, the horizontal distance of the map increases, and so does the distance between the supply points of the bullets. The player has to travel to and from both ends of the map to get a bullet while evading the boss, who is the cat owner.

At the same time, in terms of the design of scoring areas, levels are also various. In simple levels, scoring areas are placed in the center of the play space, and players only need to supply bullets once, then they can complete the level. On the more difficult levels, the scoring areas are not only smaller, but more scattered, and sometimes the player has to look for them to score.

I made these changes because I designed levels of different difficulty for different purposes, as well as unlike experience I wanted to give the player from each level. In a simple level, I just want the player to know the whole scoring mechanic of the game, which is "pooping on furniture as a cat". On the higher difficulty levels, I want the player to get to the point where they can dodge the cat owner and refill their bullets. Also, as players develop their own strategies at higher difficulty levels, the game becomes more fun.