Cat.
I was the lead game & level designer for Cat, which is a winning entry for the 2021 Heritage Game Jam organised by the Sagakaya Collective. It’s a simple, abstract puzzle game about luring cats closer to humans using food.
Complexity within simplicity.
My biggest goal with this project was to be able to create a puzzle game that would be fun for both casual players and players who needed to finish every level in the most optimal way possible. I wanted the base mechanics of the game to be very simple (i.e. click on a tile in a level and the cat moves to it.) and add layers of complexity that are gradually introduced.
To that end, past the tutorial most of the levels have a varying level of completion (think of the 1-3 star level goals that many mobile games have.) which I thought would encourage experimentation from players but at the same time reward those that optimise their strategies.
Various concepts/maps we were thinking of while creating Cat
The main gameplay flow of Cat.
Early level designs, with a labelled grid to easily test out puzzles to see if they can be solved/broken easily
Iterative Level Design.
Since this was the first game that I’ve made that has had such a linear level structure, it was initially a struggle to improve upon previous levels. It was truly an iterative process. I made a level, I tried to break it, I playtested it with friends, then I tore it down and made it again. I repeated this process with many of the initial levels before I got the hang of seeing how certain levels played out. Since I designed the game mechanics as well, it became clearer to me as time went on how a level would play out if I put a cat or a human in a specific tile on the grid. It was a good experience to intentionally force myself to make an easy level and then a level that was slightly more difficult, and to repeat that process ad infinitum. (Or at least, up till 19 levels in this case haha.) It really taught me to deconstruct the mechanics that I myself had come up with in the first place, to think of the restrictions that I had forcibly given the player as well as the set of tools that they could use to finish each level as well.
A cat ritual to summon more cats, or summon more humans?