Game page link

A Late Start

At the start we were already approximately 12 hours late for art and 24 hours late for code (I was sleeping).

The vision

Graylure had the idea of making a cat café game with customers arriving every 10 seconds and having to make their drinks. I chimed in with having cats try to escape every 10 seconds. (I went back to sleep)

The goal

With most of our game-jams we want to have high quality pixel art with less focus on interesting gameplay mechanics. For Cats and Coffee we decided to focus on cuteness and polish. Perhaps next gamejam we will try to focus unique gameplay instead.

The initial mockup

When I woke up, graylure had already mocked up most of of the game in aseprite, here's what it looked like:

I started working on the code with 'Unity'. I thought an outline system would be key to guiding users on what to click on so I got to work on that. I haven't used shader-graph before and I always wanted to learn, so why not during a game jam? I probably spent way too long figuring this out:

I know it's probably not impressive, but learning is part of the jam. I followed several tutorials on youtube to get the result I was looking for.

I was trying to figure out how to display to the user what was currently in hand. I thought maybe UI in the top left would display that.

Graylure suggested we just use the mouse cursor to display that like this:

Initially I tried to use unity's Cursor.Set method, but I realized that you can't control the pixels-per-unit, so instead I made an invisible texture to set as the mouse cursor and then I made a gameobject with a spriterenderer follow the mouse around in Update() with an offset that lines up correctly.

The colors and outlines are what changed the most from the mockup.

Some things were left out

-We had plans for cats to hide behind obstacles to stagger the 10 seconds and allow for ever increasing difficulty.

-We also had a sitting animation for the cat for that too.

I also had an in-game tutorial drafted out, but when I looked at the time left on the jam I was sent into a panic! We had only 20 minutes left and I wasn't even finished adding all the cat artwork, a win/lose condition, win screen, and a lose screen! Luckily my game-jam partner graylure was there to pick up the slack. She made nice looking tutorial for the game page.

What I wish we had done differently

Spam clicking the cats was not a popular gameplay mechanic. I wish we doubled down on the cuteness and had a click+drag mechanic similar to the game: "Impending Doom of a Thousand Kitties" Their LD51 Page

THANK YOUS!

Thanks to everyone who played our game and gave feedback! And if you haven't Please check out our game and give feedback! :cat: :coffee: :joy_cat:
CATS AND COFFEE https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/cats-and-coffee