Meow Tunes First Release

Demo Level

Updates:

•  Implementation of movement + jumping controls for the cat model. The cat can move with WASD keys, jump with space, and run with the shift key. The camera moves with the mouse.
• Camera Implementation: The camera follows the main character in a third-person view
•  First Level Layout with red, green, and white platform models
• Red and Green platform mechanic: disappear and reappear at the beat of the music. The platforms will also blink on the beat before disappearing to alert the player. Once the platform has disappeared, the player can still see the outline of the platform.
• Fish treats and score implementation: the cat can collect fish treats which add to its score.
• Checkpoint and lives implementation: the player can collect checkpoints throughout the level to respawn at key locations. These checkpoints look like cat toys. There are only 5 lives available, after the lives are spent, it is game over and the player must restart from the beginning.
• End screen implementation: if the player makes it to the end of the level, a win screen is displayed. If the player spends all their lives before making it to the end, a losing screen is displayed. Both of these have a replay option to start from the beginning again.
• Level includes sound effects for the main character and background music.

Obstacles/Challenges:

• The most challenging aspect of this very first release was getting the switching platforms to work. We had to synchronize them to the beat of the music by calculating the time intervals through some music/math formulas.
• Besides that, we had to quickly make it into a complete game and add in win/lose conditions. We also had to think more about how scoring was going to work.
• Getting the level to an easier difficulty while keeping it fun was also hard. Our first iteration of the game during the game jam was too hard to play even for some of the team members, so we had to alter the design.

Feedback from the presentation and future changes:

• Focus the game to be a single player game.
• Add in more visual cues for the platform switching and when it happens.
• The cat model should match the idea of the game, therefore we decided to go ahead with the quadruped cat concept, as an agile cat would reflect better on the platforming idea.
• Need more platform mechanics besides just the color switching. We started thinking about new mechanics such as moving platforms, bouncing platforms, doors, platforms that fall, and enemies that move to the beat.
• We also got a comment that beat detection was going to be the hardest challenge, so we put half the development team into researching methods to make this work in the most optimal way.

The creative brief document is also uploaded below.