TEAM
Ernes Railey, Eunice Lim, Weikai Wu, Zhang Zijie
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
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Designed and scripted movement and jump physics.
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Level design.
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Co-designed the game.
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Created a tool to automatically creat prefabs from sprites.
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Scripted player input, joyCon input, throwing physics.
Meow Brawler
This game is a 2D pixel PVP platformer, where two cats are trying to destroy each other by throwing different furnitures in the house. Using your unlimited cat power to throw EVERYTHING at your opponent!
I learned so much making this game. Designing a game for spectating was a very interesting and unique design challenge which pushed me to think differently.
GENRE
PvP, Action, 2D platformer
GAME ENGINE
Unity, C#
SPECTATOR-CENTRIC DESIGN PROCESS
Design Goal: A game that is fun for spectating
Changing my mindset to thinking in terms of an experience, instead of mechanics, really helped!
WHAT WENT RIGHT: EXPERT ADVISE
Got a HUGE amount of incredible advice from really amazing experts!!! I'm so grateful to Michael John and UCSC for giving us these opportunities! "Fake it!" was probably the biggest game-changer for me. I didn't think spectator input would be possible because implementing Twitch API was out of scope. Now, we have 'spectators' throwing bombs and creating chaos!
"Cheat! Just fake it with mouse input!"
- Curt Bererton (CEO, Roboto Games)
WHAT WENT RIGHT: JUMP PHYSICS
My biggest problem was scripting the jump. At all costs, I wanted to avoid the "floaty" jump which plagued my previous games. In a fast-paced action game, I felt a heavy jump was critical to maintain battle adrenaline. I spent way too many hours watching GDC talks, deriving the parabola projectile equation, researching laws of physics before finally rewriting Unity's gravity. Still, control felt terrible during the first playtest:
"Really janky physics."
- Curt Bererton
(CEO, Roboto Games)
I got advice from more experienced people (Thank you Aidan Kellen, Austin Kellar, Chris H, Zijie!) and didn't give up.
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Clamped velocity.
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Quadrupled base gravity.
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Multiplied gravity when falling.
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Reset all forces before a double jump.
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Raycast grounded checks.
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Set horizontal velocity to zero when no input.
These changes resolved a few jump bugs. HOWEVER, for the life of me I could not phantom the reason why players kept moving even through they weren't pressing any buttons.
15 jump permutations later, it suddenly clicked... the collider was a sphere. Of course a ball that's over the edge of the platform is going to ROLL AND FALL (so it felt like they were still moving). I designed a custom collider box shape just in time for the final playtest:
"Well done on the jump!"
- Kathy Astromoff
(Executive Producer, Apple Arcade)
WHAT WENT WRONG: LEGIBILITY
Upon reflection, our game’s main weakness was that players and spectators - especially those joining midway - wouldn't realize the win condition. I had designed player on-boarding assuming that players and spectators existed from the start of the game.
"PvP? Really!? I thought it was a building game!"
- Emily Grace Buck
(Narrative Lead, Gato Studio)
I was so engrossed in tuning physics, I had neglected visual clarity. With the UI ignored, the affordances of collecting items and platformer doll-house environment led our experts to believe it was a building game instead of versus game. Following their feedback, we made some immediate changes to UI which improved the next playtest experience greatly.