Project Overview
Summary of my contributions:
Follow a 5 minute experience in a dark moody city, driving around with a smug and super cool cat behind the steering wheel.
My Contribution
For this project I worked both on gameplay design but also narrative design and Implementation. After the game jam I also had to learn how to deal with a game you made blowing up online.
Planning & Concepting
The moment we got the theme, we knew we wanted to do something with a cat, we iterated between making a driving game where you toss a cat out the window and try to make it fly as far as possible, or a cat delivering packages on a wobbly bike through windings streets. In the end we settled on a very simple game where you help a cat drive a car through the night, but you're not actually driving yourself; just enjoying the atmosphere and narrative. The first evening I was the only developer with previous technical experience, so I was sitting and trying to learn C# and the Unity interface and prototyping a character controller and very simple detection system for interactables. I did not get very far before we called it a night but I learned quite a lot of how to navigate Unity as compared to Unreal and a basic rundown on the component-based nature of the engine.
Narrative
The narrative of the game had to be snappy and funny, to sell the atmosphere and follow the theme of the jam. While we wanted a lot of show don't tell, but with the limited gametime we were worried that our players would not understand what was going on, so I had to cook up dialogue that was not only funny but also informative and telling of where the player should proceed next.
Blowing up online
So why is this funny gamejam game on your portfolio Calle? Well. The game got hit with massive attention from different youtubers, streamers and even a feature on itch.io's own Youtube channel. Following game's release on Itch we saw huge numbers of players surge in and the game ended up being a success among indie game youtubers from all across the globe!
Rather quickly after the game jam we saw multiple youtube videos, instagram reels and other forms of media blow up significantly. As seen both in the image above, and the one below: the game reached top 10 rated and sold within its month on Itch.io. We garnered quite a lot of nice comments and feedback. Learning how to talk to fans and dealing with feedback at this scale has been interesting and I am humbled to see our silly little cat game becoming so popular.
