The game takes place in 1974 in Czechoslovakia in Prague, after the events of the Prague Spring in 1968. In this fictional timeline within the game, the occupation of Czechoslovakia escalated into a war between Czechoslovakia and the members of the Warsaw Pact. Through a revolution of the people versus the corrupt government, a new political party created by the people overthrew the government and fought back against the Soviets.
The game starts just as the occupation of Prague is taking place, and the players will control their chosen character as they go about their day-to-day life. Suddenly the war starts around them, as the city of Prague is under attack from the Soviet Union causing destruction and chaos. Within the destruction, the relationship between the characters begins to form as they are forced to work together to survive the war.
The players take control of a cat and a dog, with their story centred around the uneasy relationship between them and is put to the test through environmental circumstances and destruction taking place around them. The game is based around an environmental story and a puzzle adventure that introduces puzzles that the players need to work together to solve to progress through the game.
I began the project with a simple sketch of the sort of layout I wanted with how I first imagined the beginning of the game level to look like. The games direction then changed as our ideas began to develop.
After extending our ideas, we came up with a new location and design based on Pragues city blocks and decided to have the player characters start off within the block separated from the city outside.
Once we had created a rough quick sketch of how we wanted the level to look, we then started looking at game mechanics we wanted to include that was unique to each character. With both the cat and dog, we researched into things they do naturally that would be fun to play around with and create a clear difference between them. We wanted players to have that quick understanding of familiarity of what both characters can do and have fun with it. A cats instinct to jump up high, knocking objects off of counters, and stealthy movement. A dogs instinct to dig, track scents, carry objects in its mouth and grab things with its teeth to tug like a rope toy.
We then looked at simple things that they could both do; like barking and meowing, we could use this to attract attention or just for the players to spam if they wish. The obvious ability to run, which we thought could bring in chase sequences or fleeing.
Then we looked into researching the different environmental aspects within Prague that would have been around in 1974 such as architecture, the metro, apartments interior and communal spaces within city blocks. We also looked into propaganda posters that would have been used in that era by the Soviets and Czechoslovakian people.
From the research, I then created a Powerpoint presentation for the Game Artists that were collaborating with us on the project. This gave them reference images of the assets we would need within the game with detailed descriptions of the direction we were going with and the overall look we wanted.
Flow chart
Here we created a flow chart from beginning to end of how we wanted the gameplay to go and how to get the characters to interact with each other, even when they are not in the same room. For instance, when the cat is outside, how they can be stalking a pigeon that flies into the window of the apartment that the dog is in.
Motion Matching
For the project, we decided to introduce motion matching technology for the characters that matches the different animations to blend into a smooth transition between them when the player moves the character and does an action.
Below I have a video of the beginning stages of the characters animation of the cats movement and its path trajectory to show the curvature of the character as it moves, with also the blend of changing speeds between walk, trot and run, and how it knows how to switch between the animations.
Jumping & Balancing
