Fabi
Reichsoellner
The daily chaotic adventures of a little cat~ based on my own personal little agents of chaos
A purrfect catastrophe is a point and click narrative game created within the span of 48 hours as part of Minijam 127 with the theme "Cats²" and a set colour palette.
The game is licensed with Coolmath Games.
This game was a small project continuing my exploration of narrative games and improving from the first prototype Nut another harvest story.
Credits:
Art, Narrative - Fabi Reichsoellner
Code - Jack Chateau-Loney
Narrative:
The main concept of this interactive story is to create an elaborate little world in which the players can choose their own story, targeted towards children (and cat lovers).
My narrative goals for my second story game were improving my writing to match the tone and genre of the game and increasing the number of narrative branches.
I initially drafted the premise of the story by brainstorming fun cat anecdotes and highlighting the ones that tonally fit a story narrated by the cat itself. From there I began separating the stories into areas - upstairs and downstairs, bedroom and bathroom with two main stories per area. I created a diagram of each narrative branch to give both my programmer and myself a layout of the entire game.
From there I utilised Twine to draft a quick fist pass of the stories, building and testing them to improve tone and style and sending them to my programmer in batches so he could implement them throughout the jam time. As mentioned in Production, I worked in batches - creating illustrations alongside each narrative branch to gauge scope and guarantee a playable.
Once the story was fully implemented into Unity, I added animations using TextAnimator, to highlight humorous or energetic moments for more impact. The game has 4 main stories and 9 different endings.
Design:
Even though this is a story, I wanted to utilise the digital nature of my playable more, focusing on adding interactive elements and little collectables to encourage the audience to replay the game and explore different branches.
The game has bubbles the player can pop during the bathtub scene and after completing this scenario they appear in the main menu. Each route has its own prize to show progress and I aim to increase the amount of minigames next game.
Art:
The limitation for this Mini Jam was a specific colour palette which actually worked in my favour as I wanted to simplify the drawings to increase my speed and make the overall look more uniform, as well as being able to dedicate time to small animations to enliven the scene.
After defining the story, I used my time on a train to roughly sketch out scenes and their composition, to get an estimate of white space and text space.
Making sure I kept layers separated, I imported the illustrations into Unity and used a mix of small frame changes as well as DoTween in Unity for moving flowers and fish.
Production:
This was a small project with a very short production period, the biggest challenge was increasing the output while planning around our weekend obligations which reduced our time on the game.
For each main narrative branch (4), I created an Epic with smaller tasks we needed to complete to have a full story branch. While the goal was increasing the number of endings, I was not sure how many branches we would be able to complete within the time limit and the main priority was an enjoyable playable no matter how many branches were in the game. We prioritised finishing and polishing one scenario over completing all the narrative and then moving to art.
I started with the branch with the most interactive features (the bathtub), then moved to the scenario with mechanics we would reuse for other branches (taking more socks), allowing us to focus on content and saving time in the later stages.
Working with Coolmath Games, we had to implement a few changes to match the clients website requirements, such as purchasing a commercial audio license, adding a credits page, the option to mute the game, and implementing their websites API. All of the requests were reasonable to fulfil and communicating with them was straightforward and enjoyable and it gave me more insight into the commercial world of web games and making children's games.
Translation:
A purrfect catastrophe is available in English and German. The English word count is 806, and 888 in the German translation.
The main focus when translating this game was to retain the light-hearted tone of the story and maintain the cat's playful narration.
I kept the content of the story the same, but switched some of the language specific terminology to go with German sayings and jokes.
