Hello everyone!
I’ve been doing game design analysis for months as an exercise and I wanted to share them, I’ll probably be posting one each week and here’s the first one.
Cat Quest
Overview. A really basic RPG that tries to be fun and sort of epic, I think it fails in both senses, it’s still and enjoyable game tho.
The game is incredibly simple code wise, there’s nothing fancy, if you have done any of the Unity courses you can easily do a Cat Quest clone. I’m not saying that as a bad thing, what I want to point out is that you can start making and selling your own games right now, you don’t have to be a code wizard or an animation expert, this game is so overly simplistic in each and every way, the developers cut so many corners and that’s something we can learn from them. Actually, the RPG course has more things going on than Cat Quest code wise, seriously, if you’ve done that course you can simply modify the game and sell it.
I think the developers had non-gamers in mind while making this game, the game holds your hand from the start until the very end, it’s sort of annoying, it takes Navi to a whole new level of annoyingness, you actually have a “navi” (Ocarina of time “Tutorial Character”) companion which does all the talking and guidance, it even kinda looks like Navi but I think they didn’t put much analysis into why Navi exists in Ocarina of time.
As with almost every Nintendo game, they make characters out of tutorials and abilities, it’s a way to make things interesting and self-explanatory, in the comparison I’m making, Navi was designed to support the Z-targeting mechanic and give it a little more depth and functions without breaking the context. In Cat Quest the main purpose of the character is to tell you where to go, but it wasn’t needed, that’s why it gets even more annoying, the developers put dotted lines, guiding arrows and a lot more things to tell the player where to go, the character serves no real purpose other than make cat puns every 10 seconds, they could have easily get rid of that character, that’s a big, big fail if you ask me.
The combat is enjoyable but, as with pretty much every game that didn’t pay attention to game design, it’s broken. You can buy and upgrade abiltiies which aren’t many, but you can easily see which ones are the best, there’s a combo that pretty much “oneshots” (the abilities hit multiple times but you just have to press the button once for each ability) every enemy in the game, including bosses, and it’s not a complicated combo, you just need to press two buttons in certain order, that aint fun, what’s even worse is that the developers knew that and you can tell, all the “hard” bosses do that combo. The game is still enjoyable but please, don’t do that with your game, use the nerf hammer when needed.
Cutting corners.
Animations are incredibly basic. They simply overuse the “squash and stretch” principle. That’s it, you can even see how they animated everything, it’s nothing fancy but it works. Again, that’s telling us that we can make a decent selling game without having the most amazing animations ever.
The enemies and the players share the exact same abilities. Yes, they didn’t care to animate more abilities or unique things, not even for the final boss. This works in a really weird way, because it’s teasing what you’ll be able to get as a player, but also keeps things clear, when buying a new ability you don’t need a tutorial because you’ve seen it before, this is actually a pretty neat trick if you need to cut down on that particular deparment of your game. As with everything, I think it could have been done a little smoother, but at the end it works.
Questing is another big part of the game, it’s repetitive to no end, there’s only one type of quest which is follow the dotted line, kill something, that’s it, but it works because they tried to make each quest rely more on plot rather than mechanics, so, in it’s own weird way, questing doesn’t feel as repetitive.
Lessons
I think the biggest lessons this game teaches are two:
- Go out there and publish your game!
- Don’t overdo it! We all want to make the next Breath of the Wild, the next God of War, the next Cyberpunk, but let’s be realistic here, unless you have millions of dollars and teams working on your game, you won’t be able to do that.