Space Cats

Today I am late writing. Lol. I should have composed this hours ago but I’ve been trying to maximize my productivity during business hours and now it’s after dinner and all I really want to do is relax, but I promised myself I’d be consistent with this blog. Plus, it’s not even that I don’t want to write. I have a lot of exciting things I want to share! It’s just that sometimes I’m lazy……

So this past week I started working in Unity. It’s a really popular game engine and although I’ve used Game Maker Studio and Unreal Engine, I’d never tried Unity. It wasn’t too difficult to follow a tutorial and build a skeleton of a game (and by wasn’t too difficult, I mean that what was only a 45 min YouTube tutorial took me 2.5 full work days to figure out 😂). But as I finished up the tutorial, I decided that rather than scrap the really good bones I had just built, I’d expand on them and make my first ever fully flushed out game! And once it’s done, I’m gonna publish it too!

It has been really good practice as well because not only am I learning more about Unity, but I’m practicing reading/using Stack Overflow, Unity Docs, and GitHub. Basically, it’s just everything that I had learned about in a tutorial setting, in actual, practical use.

I’m not gonna tell you everything about the game just yet, but lemme just tell you that my ToDo list just keeps on expanding as my ambition grows. I know, I know, keep it small and simple. And I’m going to! But I am having SO MUCH FUN! I actually enjoy figuring out how to implement different little animations or mechanics and the whole process of game development is so much fun to me.

Pretty soon after I started expanding on the tutorial, I had big ideas about how I was gonna make this absolutely gorgeous, breathtaking, asthetic (🙄) game. I started putting in some artwork and…it sucked. Because it didn’t have any soul. No character. It wasn’t fun. And this is honestly I think a big pitfall that a lot of early game devs find themselves in: we spend all this time making beautiful games that no one wants to play because they’re boring. A game is a game first are foremost. It has to be enjoyable to play.

So I scrapped everything, tapped into my inner child/young adult and felt inspired by the early internet culture that I really miss. Enter Space Cats. Here’s some sample graphics:

Looking at some references, I made all of these (well, not the space background: that one I did animate though) which has been a really fun creative experience too! Anyway, I’m really excited to show you the rest of this game. I hope you enjoy it! And I'll let you know when it’s published. In the mean time, stay cool space cats 😎