Summary
Cat in a Box is a 2D casual simulation game where you play as a stork who creates, grows and delivers cats to homes that want them!
This project was made as a submission for the game jam series known as the Mini Jam, and also my first submitted game on itch. The jam's 3-day limit taught me to urge into an idea, and work around it within a tight schedule.
My workflow for this project
What helped me into the idea for this game was the jam's set theme, which was "travel"; this allowed me to limit the scope of my ideas
into one that is feasible for the jam's duration.
My next action here was to plan out my workflow throughout the project. I eventually settled with the following plan:
Day 1: Draw all possible game assets, project generation and organisation.
Day 2: Main system design and programming
Day 3: Create background music and finalize project
Implementation of the Game
Movement
The player character only moves horizontally, since the game consists of a single scene split in two. The player moves via a mouse click, where the position clicked is recorded and the player moves towards it.
These two images are the two splits of the singular gameplay scene.
One other thing to note is that the player character's sprites and animations change depending on what part of the scene the player is in.
Main Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop here is simple: generate the cats, feed the cats with food to ready them, and deliver them to the correct house.
The houses will ask for cats of specific colour, and the player must grow and deliver the right coloured cat to obtain score.
Cats are generated in the factory (the three blue tubes) for every fixed number of seconds. These cats are also made to queue up in the factory system,
generating a new cat when the current one is taken by the player, as many intervals of cats generated have passed in time.
Here, to save the required resources for the game, as well as some fps within the gameplay, I decided to make the factory and the cats a single object,
where the player's interaction with the cats in the boxes will change their sprite/toggle in visibility depending on their states.
For example, whenever a cat box is generated (green box in above), the box is made visible with the sprite changed to the green version.
Also, notice that the cat box above the player character (red box above) has a sprite of a fully grown cat. This is also merely a sprite change,
as well as a change in a bool element of the factory, indicating that the player can "take" the cat.
Accordingly, when the player "takes" the grown cat, the cat's sprite is made invisible, with the player character being given data for holding the red cat.
The same "sprite hiding" design is used on the cat food factory.
Other Trivia
Since I didn't have any experience on DAWs, I had to quickly pick up and learn Ableton 12 in order to make some basic background music.