Welcome back to our DevLog! Take a cup of your favorite beverage, get cozy and enjoy the read!

Last week I focused a lot of my time on the cat and the whole process of animating and implementing it into our game. But our game was missing a very important part: The paw owner (see what I did there?). 

Since our game is based around those two different kind of characters interacting with each other, our prototype could not be called finished yet. It was like yin without its yang, the contrast was missing and our gameplay resembled that boring white circle yin is on its own.

So this week I focused on bringing in the human character! And adding the interaction between those two, so the game is actually playable against each other.

But first to the human:

Luckily making the animations for the human was a lot easier than doing the animations for the cat. What a relieve! Since this is only the prototype, I didn't start making our own character since that would have taken away too much time. I got a free character I found fitting online and edited the textures a bit. Meet Greg!

Since this is a humanoid character, we were able to get animations from Mixamo (Which is a side by Adobe that has a bunch of different animations to choose from). I searched for animations that would fit our game, including running, cleaning and lifting and imported everything to our Unreal Project.

Setting up the Animation Blueprint was definitely more challenging than for the cat because the human character needs a lot more different actions + animations than the cat does. But it worked out eventually and moving the character worked well (even tho there was no function bind to it yet).

So the functionality was next. What were the most important things our human has to be able to do?

• Clean up irreparable mess
• Pick up objects and put them back
• Spray the cat with water

I started off with cleaning up, since the only objects we had so far was a vase that breaks on impact.

As you can see in the video, I also implemented one of the effects that Bjorn made for the impact of the objects when it hits the floor. You will be seeing in a couple more times from here on.

When that was done, I created a new object class: Besides our "Destructables", I introduced the "Pushables" to the game. 

Our first pushable was the lamp you saw in the prototype from last week. The cat can throw it over now and the human can pick it back up. There is no limit on how often that can happen, so the same lamp could be pushed over multiple times a game while destructables can only be destroyed once (makes sense, right?).

Now that the main object types were implemented I started working on the spray mechanic. First I tested collision with a sphere (which looked really funny) but I was glad when Bjorn gave me a simple water effect to work with. The cat players get stunned now when being hit by water and it´s even possible to stun multiple cats at the same time!

So far so good. Even tho the interaction worked properly at this point, I still wasn't happy with only having to different interactables in the scene. Our game is supposed to have a lot of different things to discover that all feel like they are working a bit differently. So I wanted to capture the essence of that at least a little bit in our prototype. 

May I present, our new Items:

Bottle (Destructible):

The bottle behaves pretty similar to the vase, it breaks on impact with the ground. BUT! It leaves a puddle of wine behind as well. This leads to the bottle needing two clean up actions: One to remove the shards and one to clean up the wine.

Paintings (Pushable):

This fine collection of important modern art pieces doesn't only look good, it also functions. If the cat player pushes against the wall, the painting falls and has to be put back up.

Book(s) (Pushable):

The simply fly away when the cat pushes them and the human needs to reposition them. There are singular books, but also sets of 3 that split up and make the human run.

Pillows (Pushable):

Last but not least, I added a sofa with some pillows that can be thrown around. 

Now that all the mechanics were implemented the game was already playable. But without a score there was not really a point in playing it.

We needed a score system, our mess meter and a proper level design. And for that I give over to my dear team member Glenn! 

(Written by Sarah)

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The stamina meter is an important part of the game, it balances the character out and makes the game feel more fair. Last week I made sure that the stamina indicator followed the player around wherever they are in the level, however the functionality of it was questionable at the time. So this week I made sure the visualization ran as expected.

The mess meter is another important part of the gameplay. It indicates which players are ahead and winning. For now I decided making it functional would be the highest priority. Whenever a cat player would make some mess, the mess meter would gain the amount of points assigned to that object. The opposite is true whenever the human player cleans the mess up, only in this case more points would be subtracted from the meter to balance the players out.

Next up was the level lay-out. The team all agreed that the current test level is too small for the actual game. So in this case you could say that bigger is better. We also decided to play around witch the layout of the level. What will the apartment look like, where should we place each room end how do we get the most interesting gameplay possibilities from our level setup. I went ahead and made sketches to get a feel of what worked and what did not.

After some feedback I started translating our favorite ideas in unreal.

3 Favorite layouts 

Favorite layouts further explored.

However, we quickly discovered that the bigger our level was the smaller our player became. So It was clear that another variation was needed. In the latest version I decided to got back to what we knew worked, a default square build up. Building up the level this way has a few mayor benefits, first of all the screen space get utilized as much as possible and there is no dead and empty spaces left behind form rooms that are sticking out, and second we get the most amount a play space possible without having to zoom out and making our characters small as a result. Maybe sometimes, keeping it basic really is the best option. we will of course keep exploring more options during the process, and we'll make sure to keep you updated. 

(Written by Glenn)

The FX for the projects have seen a slight addition of a hint effect that will be used later on to highlight objects that are interactible,

along with the base of the water spray effect.

Afterwards, there will be FX made for hitting objects and some that play upon sprinting.

These effects will see a drastic change in the near future. 

(Written by Bjorn)

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The Sound Design phase has officially started!
I've made a Sound Bible consisting of an Audio Asset List (a list of all the sounds + descriptions we we will need for the game), and an Audio Master Document.
In the Audio Master Document, I motivated our choices on which DAWs we were going to be using, which Middleware, etc.
a DAW is a Digital Audio Workstation, and we'll be using 3: LMMS for general music composition, Ableton for polishing, and Reaper for general Sound Effects production.
Wwise will be used to implement the sounds into the game, and we're very excited to announce that we'll be using the Adaptive/Modular Music capabilities of Wwise! The music will be changing based on the position of the Mess Meter, and the time left on the clock. I've started working on the main theme, the instruments, the melody and the chord progression are taking form. Next step is precisely planning out the idea we had in mind for the modular composition in-game, and carefully create the stems so they all match with each other.

(Written by Watse)

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My part in the project was mostly figuring out how the local multiplayer worked, Implementing proper controller and keyboard support and fixing bugs here and there.

(Written by Pjotr)

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As an extra bonus our lovely team member Sarah took it upon herself to bake cookies, what do cookies have to do with this game you ask? They where CATtitude themed!

No cats were harmed during the baking of these cookies or during any part of our project. Sincerely the Cattitude team.