Another week, another dev log.

This week we finally started production! But as you can imagine, that doesn't come without a few challenges.

First and foremost is the balancing of the game, in our previous version, it was really easy for the cats to get the upper hand so Sarah and me took it upon ourselves to change how some mechanics worked, changed how the players interact with the environment and introduced some new mechanics to spice things up.

First I tackled the level again.

In our last dev log you could read about how we tried to find the best layout for our level and the conclusion we made at the end of that research. This week we refined that idea and are confident we found the perfect layout. I started from the square level again and added minimal extrusions to the walls the give it a more dynamic feel.

You'll also notice that the walls are a lot bigger now, this too was done in the name of balancing, the cats where able to get to a lot of the items without much of a challenge, adding harder to reach places with a high value reward at the and of those parcours would make the breaking of the items even more rewarding in our opinion.

We also tried our hand at fixing the stamina issues we were experiencing. Issues like, only being able to attack once and having to wait for the stamina to be fully reloaded again, or making the cat move slow only when it depleted its stamina and is recharging. Even though we managed to fix a handful of these issues more bug fixing and troubleshooting needs to be done and we'll make sure you will be updated on this as well.

Another clear way to balance the game was by changing the values each item would add to the mess meter , so in this version of the game the value of cleaning vs breaking items should be noticable.

That was it for me this week, I'll now let Sarah tell you all the exciting things she has been working on this week.

(Written by Glenn)

Like Glenn already mentioned, this week was all about balancing. If the game isn´t fair and enjoyable for both parties in the end, all the work was for nothing.

While Glenn was busy with designing fair and fun levels, I took a closer look at how to balance our game by adjusting gameplay logic and implementing new helper mechancis.

The Human

I started by making gameplay for the human player a bit faster. When testing we found cleaning up things just takes too long for him to properly deal with three cats at the same time, so I speeded up the cleaning processes and the respective animations.

Example: Putting a lamp back up now takes 1 second instead of 2.

Before:

Now:

The spraying mechanism at this point was not really useful for the human. The spraying animation took as long as the stunning of the cat, so practically by spraying, the human also stunned himself. What I did to improve on that dilemma, was shortening the spraying animation by quite a bit and making the stun on the cat have a longer effect.

Before:

Now:

I also added a new item, the human can pick up to get a boost! How it works? The human can collect the item by simply walking into its collsion box. As soon as he picked it up, a circle on the ground spawns, indicating the radius in which items would be picked up upon the next interaction. Within 5 seconds he can choose when to interact to pick up as many items as possible. Sounds complicated? Let me show you:

The Cat

Balancing the cat just meant to make it a bit weaker. One issue when testing last week, was that the cat could just keep the human from cleaning by spamming interaction on an object. To solve this, I gave the human player priority, so that if he is cleaning up, no cat has access to the object. I also added a cooldown on objects, so that if for example a lamp got thrown over and picked up again, the cat can´t push it over immediately again.

Another thing we decided to implement, are little QTE´s or minigames, the cat has to solve when trying to push something. Because fully implementing those at this point would be a bit overkill, I tested how it would play out to have a little break when attacking. That itself worked out well, but it made issues with our stamina occur that we were not be able to fix yet. So for the current prototype, we took the break out again.

The Interaction

The next element I added, was another item for the human, but this time it was something that interacts with the cats. The human can take up the item (which is a ball of yarn) and carry it to a desired spot before making use of it. Once he drops it, all cats within a certain radius will be attracted by the item and move to it's location. Their input gets disabled until the stun is over and they can move freely again.

(Written by Sarah)

The production for the meshes is also in progress.

Currently, a set of meshes for the kitchen is near finished. And interactible objects are next along with the set for the living room!

This includes all of the meshes that wont move, but will be able to be used to fill up the main shapes of the scene, with maybe some interaction coming from something like a faucet.

The texture made for these, and pretty much  most of the assets is a color atlas with the different colors that are needed throughout the scene. This makes texturing quite easy.

(Written by Bjorn)