Defend the Chef!

How To Play

Use your mouse.

Click and drag to move a cat, release to set them free.

If a cat steals the chef's food, it's game over.

If the chef can cook the meal, you win!

Playtester Feedback Form

Technical Details

• Submission Form Link
• GitHub Link

Lecture Details

In this game's code the cats' behavior is dictated by a state machine. Idle: the cat will stay still for a certain amount of time. Roaming: the cat will move to a random x location within the screen. Jumping: the cat will move to a specified y location. Advancing: the cat will move their x position towards the food. Stealing: triggered when the cat is in collision with the food, the cat will stay still for a time before committing to stealing. Runaway: once stealing is up, run away with the food and trigger the game's fail state. Picked: the cat's position will follow the player's mouse with a slight delay. Falling: the cat will fall back down to the floor after picked is released and be launched if the mouse is far. Starstruck: triggered in the win condition, the cats will stay still and wonder at the cooked food.

Design Details

Balance

There were a lot of moving parts in this one. As the state machine for the cat behavior grew, I found myself tweaking variables over and over. Each new state introduced new game feel so the previous states would need to accommodate this. The first time I really played through, there were so many cats on screen that it was impossible to win! Replaying and rebalancing brought this number down until I was able to reasonably win the game consistently. 

Communication

For this game I took the time to draw out the simple animations. The theme of the jam is 'use your mouse' so I thought it would be fitting to use my mouse to draw the assets as well! Each drawing represents a different state of the cats which helps to prioritize which are more likely to steal from the chef. Cats can only attempt to steal if they are in the 'advancing' state. This state is differentiated by the 'roaming' state with a detail change of the eyes being open or closed. Then to highlight the main mechanic, the cats have an animation change to being scruffed and will make sound effects to further enhance the effect. I also wanted to ensure that there is a timer in the scene so the player knows relatively how long it will take to reach the win condition. 

Freshness

To make the cats stand out against each other I utilized multiple colors. But I did not want to make so many animations if the animation trees were going to be the same. I found 'Blend Trees' in the animator window and looked more into that for this game. Instead of making animation changes between animation clips, they were made between blend trees. Each blend tree held the same animation in each color. Then all I had to do is choose a random number out of the 5 colors and set the blend trees to that. So all of the cats use the same animator instead of 5 different ones! I only ended up using the 1 dimensional blend tree for this game, but there are different ones that can take even more input so I'm curious to see how they would be used as well.

Additional Info

Some sound effects in this project from Freesound.org

Crossed Path, a lo-fi instrumental hip hop track by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/609209/ -- License: Attribution 4.0