Scarf Cats
Roles: Lead Designer
Team Size: 9
Development Time: January 2019 - May 2019
Platform: PC/Mac
Scarf Cats is a co-op adventure game where you and a friend work together to solve puzzles and traverse the world, all while tied together by a scarf! Kit and Grandma go to meet Grandpa for a picnic, but he's all the way on the top of the mountain! Tied together by the scarf Grandma is knitting for Kit, they flip levers, jump gaps, solve puzzles and climb the mountain to get to Grandpa!
Scarf Cats was the winner of the Audience Choice and Best in Show awards at MSU's 2019 game showcase.
Project Responsibilities
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Designing movement systems and character interactions
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Designing puzzles
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Designing camera system and developing early prototype
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Level design
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Playtesting
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Balancing
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Bug fixing
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Assigning tasks to and monitoring progress of other designers
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Maintaining documentation for design team
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Communicating team progress and state of game to clients
Challenges and Solutions
This project was a lesson in making sure to learn the capabilities of your engine and assets early on in the process. Making this game in Unity meant we were limited in how we could handle collisions in our game. Since we made the decision to try and go for more organic shapes in the environment we either needed to use polygon colliders or us more simple shapes that approximately fit our environment objects. A ways into the project we ran into the problem that the way our scarf's collision detection worked was causing performance issues when interacting with some of our polygon colliders, and switching those to simpler colliders solved the performance issues, but caused inaccuracies in the collisions in many of our platforming sections, creating unwanted difficulty and unnecessary frustration for our players. Eventually we were able to mostly solve both problems by creating slightly more complex colliders that better fit our environment pieces out of a small number of simpler colliders, though it's not perfect in every instance. If we had been more thorough in testing what our engine could handle early on, we could have planned the creation of our environment assets around the limitations and avoided a lot of the issues we ran into.