Funny Kitty Stick
Interact with many cute kitties in the game with a real kitty stick. Imagine a naughty cat staying in your room. What you want to do and what the kitty wants to do in this room are super good chances for you two to bond.
The dream of having a cat on the internet is coming true.
This is a funny kitty simulator.
You can find fun with a kitty during the thing that you don't want them to do in reality. Enjoy the release of mood and get an unparalleled visual experience with the kitty.
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Role: User researcher
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An alt-ctrl game made in Unity, present at GDC alt ctrl 2023
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Duration: 3 months
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Team: 12 Devs
Contributions
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Creating an engaging and captivating game trailer that evokes strong emotions and sparks curiosity among the audience.
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Taking charge of user research activities, such as conducting playtests, developing questionnaires, collecting and analyzing data.
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Visualizing and presenting the findings from playtesting sessions to inform the game development process.
Postmortem
We only focus on two aspects, cute and the feedback of the stick during the development. And we didn't realize a tough truth was coming to us.
As for cute, we have excellent tech artists to implement more cat animation in the game. There were more than 10 interactive animations until the last playtest.
Also, we improved the magnet and put it on the ground so that we could give feedback when the kitty caught the stick in the game.
I got almost half of the play testers during the first playtest to keep neutral for this game. The harsh reality is that after we made these changes. We clarify these 50% of play tester's attitudes. That's negative. It's so hard to accept this truth that we don't make it better at the end of the development, and no time to change too much.
What we learned from this project:
Prove the mechanism as soon as possible:
The team's priority is making the room and cat more delicacy and cute when I join this team. And everyone on the team is not clear about the gameplay. The design team goes through a challenging period, so we move the design stuff forward slowly.
In the end, everyone playing this game is satisfied with the art style and animation but confused about how they should do in the game.
In the beginning, we didn't prove this "sandbox" room, so we can't change the playtest result even if we add more animation.
Put art design after mechanism proved:
Once we settle down in a beautiful environment at the beginning of development, we'll find it hard to change our direction in case of not to waste the work of artists. But the truth is that the only way not to destroy artists' jobs is to prove our gameplay as soon as possible. After that, the art will be the icing on the cake.
Quickly iterate and narrow down each sprint:
We settled down two weeks as a sprint and had four sprints total. In each sprint, we changed a lot on hardware to improve the feedback of the stick. After improvement, we left less time to playtest or prove our correct decision. That caused a harsh result at the last playtest; more player testers felt bored compared to the first. It's right for us to change, but the direction is essential. Once we make a decision, we should test it ASAP to ensure the right direction.
Overall, it's a valuable experience to develop an alt-control game so that we can think outside the box. Always asking questions during the development. What is our alt-control? Why do we need this alt-control? Is this a new experience for the player to try this alt-control? How does this alt-control work with the game? Etc.