Project Description

Purr-ramid is a one-button, cat-stacking game that involves making a cat tower to a heart-rope finish line. It is developed by ysong and pumibless on itch.io, songy696@newschool.edu, and tum227@newschool.edu respectively. After we were given a prompt to make a “one-button game”, we brainstormed ideas for rhythm games like “Taiko: Drum Master” and “The Impossible Game”. From that, we grabbed the inspiration for accurately chopping up ingredients for a stew. With the stream of food games flooding our ideas, we thought of a player that would move from point a to point b automatically while dropping down pizza toppings with a press of a button. That idea turned into a burger ingredient stacking game and eventually the burger was replaced with cats. The game involves a bit of strategy as players need to take note of how many cats they have available and how they may maneuver cats to make a bridge.

What went right

Our idea and concept were definitely solid in the way that it was fun and cute. The assets made by You Jin enhanced this theme, especially for filling up the environments for each stage while using that to make different levels (ex: the bathtub and the two beanbags). We included particle effects for juicy feedback, like the bubbles in the bathroom stage, the hearts that come out when you drop a cat and the rainbow trail effect that appears when a cat drops down on an area that isn’t on the furniture. In addition to enhancing juicy feedback, we included audio clips for cat meows, for when a cat blasted off and background music for each scene. Within our code, we separated managers amongst elements that include and are not limited to controlling: UI, Spawning, controlling variable of maximum cats and “player” movement. These scripts were then connected to a “Game Manager”, something we used to hold the main scripts and to activate them each scene. We did this as efficiently as possible so we could reuse the managers in the next stage, while easily adjusting variables in the inspector.

What went wrong

There are several unsuccessful and needed bit of upgrades in Purr-amid are physics behavior on second level (bathtub level), and little challenges to keep the play experience interesting. For physics, it is a minor problem. When cats are stacked on top of water, the purramid becomes stable and the bathtub loses the flow of water effect (buoyancy effect). This takes away the challenge as well as the theme of the level. However, we just need to implement a simple code to keep the effect consistent. The game does not consist of bonus points, punishments, and obstacles. 

What we’ve learned/ Future Development

For our future development, we’d love to add some sort of obstacle to our game. We even had the asset ready, a baby chick, that would fly across the stage and knockout cats falling down. The player would also be able to knockout the baby chick themselves by sacrificing a cat. During our game review, we received feedback for making collectibles, for example, a yarn ball that might bounce across the scene and if the player dropped a cat on it, the maximum amount of cats available would increase. We would also like to adjust the physics of the bathroom scene, specifically the bounciness of level and to retain it. Of course, we’d also like to add more levels along with all these elements. If we ever made a mobile game out of this, maybe the maximum amount of cats available would be something we could buy in-store.