It’s The Little Things

My game is almost done and I’m very proud of this little psychedelic space cat game that I've been working on for a little over a month. I still have to make sure that I have everything set up for release on Steam, add controller support, and eventually add mobile compatibility. But for all intents and purposes, my game is done. Let me tell you about some of the things I’m proud of:

Here’s the main game image. Ngl, this is one of those little things I really love.

First, there’s the Catnip effect. When the space cat collides with the Catnip power-up, the cat now has a rainbow tail, the background pulses in rainbow, and everything speeds up 2x. One of the hardest things about getting this implemented right was to make sure that the player had a good experience while playing it. This meant that I needed to gradually increase the speed over a few seconds, gradually apply the visual and audio effects, and then make sure that the effect also faded out. It’s a simple enough problem but this proved pretty complex for me. It took a lot longer to get it working the way I wanted it to. In the end, this is one of the features I’m most proud of.

This cat is in full Catnip mode.

The next one I’m really proud of is the planet spawner. It doesn’t add any playing functionality but I really like the way it looks and it adds a nice detail to the game. What’s cool about it is that the planets are spawned programmatically in random positions, sizes, and speeds. Their size and speed correspond so that the larger the object is, the faster it moves across the screen, effectively creating depth in the otherwise flat game.

Another one I'm really proud of is my Game Over screen. Whenever the player dies, random, funny quotes appear on the screen. The quotes are dependent upon whether or not the player chose to ignore the Catnip Effect or whether they decided to try out the power up (by the way, points are double if you’re in Catnip mode). After writing an if statement, a quick Google search told me that a ternary would be better suited for this, so I swapped it out for a more concise code block. I find it fitting that ternaries use a ? because I always forget about them 😂

One of the final touches I added to my game was a simple countdown when the player resumes following a pause. It seems simple enough, and it is, but it still took me a minute to get it working right. This is one of those little details that is really easy to overlook but adds to the player enjoyment when they aren’t suddenly thrust into space again following a pause. Temple Run does this and as a player, I really appreciate it. It makes the game seem more fair.

As a side note, previously I said that I had a lot of features planned for Space Cats but I’ve decided to slightly limit my scope on this game and instead focus on just shipping a product I’m proud of, even if it’s simpler. To avoid getting stuck in the tutorial and the ever expanding project hell, I’m limiting the power ups to just Catnip. This is mostly so that I can keep learning and improving and eventually, releasing more games!

Overall, I’m really excited to release the game. I know I’m going to learn so much more during the publishing process and I think it’s really important that we all have practice taking something all the way to the finish line and to public consumption. It’s been really satisfying to go from not knowing anything in Unity at all, to now feeling a lot more comfortable in the engine. And even though I know I have so much more to learn still, my debugging skills have significantly improved, I know how to look up solutions to my problems, and most importantly, I’m not as scared as I used to be to crack open my editor and actually read my code! It’s not as intimidating as it was even two months ago.

So yes, it’s the little things that often, bring a ton of satisfaction. It’s changing the background to a different shade that really changes the appearance of the game, it’s the little Catnip effect that was so buggy you almost wanted to throw out all the code (okay that one isn’t that little; it’s a core game component), it’s the subtle button audio click that is so satisfying, it’s the cheeky comment when you get a Game Over, or maybe it’s the puns you put in the game throughout. It’s the little things.

I couldn’t help myself 😂