A day with Mochi
2023
My roles
Intentions :
Cat-astrophic - Cute - Chill
3C Designer
Gameplay programmer
Pitch :
You are Mochi, a cute and mischievous cat on the tropical island of San-Felicete. Use your charm to manipulate the humans or try to scare them the way you want. Use various fun objects, cause mayhem and enjoy your playground in this postcard-like town!
3rd person sandbox cat game | 9 months
Unreal Engine 5 - Perforce - Notion
Context
This game is my graduation project for my master in Game Design. In a team of 11 people, we worked during our full 5th year to deliver a polished vertical slice of an original game concept for June 2023.
My rôle
On this project, my main responsibility was the cat controller. My role was to design it, test it, iterate and implement it fully in the engine.
Three main intentions were driving the design :
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Having a controller simple and funny to manipulate
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Giving the player maximum freedom to roam around the island
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Making each movement and their transitions as fluid as possible
Pen and paper
For each 3C feature I usually start by working with my pen and pieces of paper. Drawing and writing helps me clarify design ideas and technical solutions. It is also very usefull to explain the features to others.
During this process, I often talk with other team members to get their opinion. I usually talk a lot with our animator Yanis. We try to find the best way to structure the movement in order to have a satisfying animation while keeping the fluidity of the controller.
Working in the engine
Then, when I am satisfied with an idea/solution, I start implementing it into the engine. I usually isolate myself during programming tasks to have a better concentration.
It is often a time where I iterate and might modify the design of the feature if necessary. If the results are really not satisfying, I restart from scratch to the pen paper phase. With this process, I am sure to get minimum quality results but the time required is hard to anticipate. So I plan the tasks with excessive time to complete even if I usually finish features early.
When a movement is implemented, I work with the animator and help him add the animation on the controller. There is a lot of back and forth by modifying slightly the movements or the animations to make them fit nicely.
Making the systems
With 2 other designers, we came up with a gameplay system with several attributes that have behaviours that interact with each other. From this, we created many objects to play and experiment with. Some of them have unique utilities and interactions.
I worked as a gameplay programmer to implement those systems and make the multitude of objects funny to manipulate.
Conclusion
This project is my first 3rd person and large-scale Unreal Engine game. I have learned a lot about the engine, its strength and good practice during its development. The controller for this game is quite unusual and challenged me in many aspects, from assisting players' controls to 3rd person camera movements.
We were glad to receive very good feedback from the project's final jury.
