Release Date: 2023 March 14th
Studio: CatRollz (self-employed owner)
Platforms: Android
Team Size: 5
Project Length: 2 Months
My contributions:
Lead the team to rapidly develop a mobile game.
Designed the gameplay loop and UI systems.
Created character and asset briefs for our Artists,
Published the game on the Google Play store.
Created a website and coordinated media generation.
Engine and Tools:
Unity
Photoshop
Trello
When Designing Cat Climber I researched the top performing games on both the Apple and Google App Stores. From games like Clash of Clans to Jet Pack joy ride they all had similar design trends (I am not going to talk about monetization trends and tactics TL:DR big push on FOMO and deals when the player first opens the game. Some of the most notable trends were:
Getting the player playing as fast as possible. there was commonly seen in endless runners. Jetpack Joy ride only requires to player to press once on the screen after only the game to start playing.
Huge progression system, from levels to complete to tons of perks and upgrades to be unlocked in shops. Supercell games and Candy crush were the best examples.
Idle games have some of the best tactics to get the player to comeback to there game with them attempting to get the player to build an attachment to the game via using cute animals and notifications saying “your pets are lonely”.
Since we had a very small time budget we opted to design a game that used the method of getting the player playing the game as fast as possible.
Design the Gameplay Loop
First we would choose what style of game it would be e.g. is it going to be an endless runner or a rhythm game. for us it was an endless tower defense game.
Then it was creating an interaction that the player could easily understand and perform that would A. start the game and B. let them know how to play the game.
Since the theme of the game was protecting the tower from incoming meteorites. The player would start the game by blocking an incoming meteorite and placing it on their tower.
There is only one way the player can lose, this was by having a meteorite hit the tower ultimately ending the game.
Publishing
I released Cat Climber on the google play store via using their Google Play Console. The process was a good learning experience. Google required you did your own internal testing before releasing the game fully. Quite a lot of hoops I had to jump through from setting up keystones and authentication to generating media.
Personally unless I’m making a android exclusive mobile game or my target audience is Asia I won’t be actively trying to publish through Google Play Console. Mainly due to a back forth process and long wait times for my game to be cleared.
Unfortunately the game is not longer on the Google Play Store due to the target API not being 31. I will say developing for android is way easier then IOS and PC. So fast and only having to create one version that will work across multiple different devices is amazing.
Cat Climber was my chance to develop and publish a game to the google play store. It was also my time being the lead designer for a mobile game.
The development took about 4 week with a further 4 dedicated to playtesting, bug fixing and publishing the game.
I research a lot of games to find out what makes a mobile stick. TL:DR getting your player straight into the gameplay and giving them competition or rewards to grind for.
Goals
Publish to the Google Play Store
Create a game that gets the player playing quickly
Improve my design skills in a new area of game dev.
Art Style
One of the goals for Cat Climber was too create a friendly and cute aesthetic. We wanted our Cat Climber to have an inviting atmosphere and an animal that matched our aesthetic.
We used pixel art for the characters and environment
It wanted to used to use simplified images for the shop but this was scrapped due to time.