(3D Game, 3D Modeler / Unity Implementer / Producer)

Untitled Cat Cafe

Play as a cat as you wreak havoc in a cat cafe.
Clear the cafe of the humans.
Claim the cafe as your own.
Meow.

Made as a final project for UCLA Engineering's Intro to Unity course.

Assembling a Team & Idea

In the fall of 2023, I took an Intro to Unity course in order to develop my knowledge of the engine, knowing UCLA students primarily work in Unity. For our final project, we were tasked with creating a game in teams. On the first day, I met Kel, a fantastic animator with no programming experience and knew we had to combine both of our 3D skills to make a game inspired by our shared love for The Untitled Goose Game. Derek, who liked working with game AI helped with character behaviors, and Anh was brought on to help with other programming tasks.

Pitching the Idea & Writing a Game Design Doc

We had to present the idea for approval, so we created a pitch presentation and a game design doc.

Making the Assets

I learned 3D Modeling in an intro course at Irvine Valley College and felt really comfortable with the tool. Since our team wanted to use all original assets for the project, I mainly focused on making the models and textures for the game. This meant populating the environment and making the characters. The characters were modeled using 2D turnarounds references supplied to me by Kel. Everything else I modeled and textured without concept art. I also made a few rigs and prop animations that did not make it into the final version (due to time constraints).

Implementing in Unity

While Anh and Derek were cleaning up (a lot of bugs), I decided to teach myself Unity implementation. I imported the models, created colliders and prefabs, attached shaders, messed with the camera, and set up the scene, among other things.

Results & How I'd Improve It

Aesthetically, we created an adorable and beautiful game. The art and animations are very clean. There are plenty of bugs that need fixing, but nothing that makes it unplayable. If I were to improve the game, I would definitely go into the code and fix the implementation of tasks. Our game design doc had tasks that were more fun and easier to solve than what was executed. For example, I would add a task that cooks based on recipe instead of "FIRE!!!!!" which requires the player to burn a number of food items. How is the player supposed to know that they have not met the threshold of burnt food? In the future, I will put greater emphasis on the importance of communicating any changes made to design during implementation.