CAT-ASTROPHE
ROLE
Independent
DESCRIPTION
Cat-astrophe was my first solo development project as well as my first project in 3D. I spent a semester working on this for an independent study through the Simulation, Animation, and Gaming department of Eastern Michigan University. Through this project I implemented everything from UI to animations to physics. The idea of the game came from raising my cat, Momo, and dealing with his shenanigans, I imagined he had a lot of fun destroying my things so I figured other people would enjoy doing that in a game. I took my main inspiration from Untitled Goose Game but made the objectives less about specific things and more about doing as much damage in a specific time limit. I showcased this at the UM-EMU joint games showcase so that influenced a lot of the design as well. I created a game that would be fun for a couple short rounds so more people could try it out and have fun.
POLISH, POLISH, POLISH
Throughout development I used this project as a way to implement what I learned in my Unity II class, implementing a nice post-processing stack was a big part of that. I used mostly free assets so the style had to be kind of silly and cheap looking; however, once I added effects like depth of field, chromatic aberration, as well as ambient occlusion the game looked far better than it did before.
Despite only having 3 months of development while taking on 4 other classes, I focused a lot on polish and making the presentation look nice. Whether that be screen transitions, sound effects, or lighting. All of these came together to make a game which I thought was fun but not as deep as I wanted to be into an impressive portfolio piece and second game.
RAGDOLL PHYSICS
A common interaction I wanted to have was pushing objects off of tables and whatnot. I didn't want objects to be kinematic though and get pushed around all the time however. So I created an interact button which is used to trigger the fun destruction of any object, in the case of knocking objects down I had to figure out how to give them force, make it fun, but not mess with my lighting due to objects being static and baked with the lighting. In order to do this I check in the collision for the object if the player is pressing the interact key, if they are the object's rigidbody type is changed to kinematic, a sound effect is played, and it given a very high force in one direction, enough to make it silly.
Due to my lack of experience with 3D physics in Unity at the time this took much longer than I was anticipating to get right. The hard part was once I added my lighting in the object's lighting would get all messed up when thrown due to the lighting being baked rather than real-time. This is a good example of why there is a need for both real-time and baked lighting in games.