Cat Herding Jam

About the project

Cat Herding was a senior project where a team of 7 people including myself made a game jam submission around the idea of “Pick a random Holiday in December“. So we made a game for International cat herding day December 15th. With the premise of what if you were a mouse catching cats instead of the other way around. The project was built in Unity 2D.

My Role

As the primary designer and engineer on the team, the framework of the game was my responsibility. I made sure you could start, play, score, and win the game, as well as designing certain features like the “Cat Paw Counter“ and working with the Art Dept to make it happen. The most interesting part of this project for me was the AI and scoring mechanisms for the stray cats.

Features I Worked on

cat behavior

The Goal:

Have the stray cats flee from the player in predictable ways so that the player can easily direct them towards the pens and complete the game.
Have the Cats wander around the map in predefined zones until influenced by the player. After being left alone Cats should return to normal wander pattern
Cats who enter the Corral no longer wander out of the victory zone.

The Method:

Markers were used to designate what areas were assigned to each cat as their “Home Base“ within this zone Cats would pick a random direction and move in that direction at a random speed at random intervals. Once the player controller reached a certain distance from any given cat it would trigger an event where the cat would flee in the exact opposite direction of the player(this made the Cats easy to direct and herd towards the goal). Once the player controller was out of the range of influence of the cats they would path back to their home base and return to “patrolling AI pattern”. If the player pushed one of the cats into the Pen then an event would trigger that the cat would set it’s new Home base as the area within the Pen so as to not wander off. This would also trigger the Cat Paw Counter on the bottom right side of the screen to show you how many cats you have left to catch.

Paw Counter

The Goal:

After some playtesting we found we needed to convey the information of how many Cats the player has left to catch somewhere on screen. For which I proposed and rough drafted a feature where paws would “Light up“ as the player collected Cats in the Corral.

The Method:

The Paw Counter is pretty simple it’s just an Int value that goes up when you collect more cats and reveals a highlighted Paw Print on the screen instead of the outlined semi-transparent Paw Print. This is the same function that triggers the end of game screen.