Concept
For my midterm project, I want to do a cute little game where the user gets to play around on the beach as a cat. Initially, I wanted the game to be about a turtle that lays eggs on the beach because I go on turtle nest patrols on Saadiyat as a volunteer and it is one of the most exciting activities I get to do in spring. Sadly, it was impossible to find a sprite sheet and terrain elements of the aesthetic style I am going for, and I had to swap the main character from a turtle to a cat. The game is essentially a cat simulator on the beach, where the player gets to feed, play with the cat and explore the beach.
Aesthetics/Resources
All of the images used in this game are from the following website: https://opengameart.org/users/bluecarrot16
I always find picking the overall theme of the project to be the most difficult part, which is why I spent a lot of time looking for the fitting terrain, beach elements, and sprite. At the moment I am using the following images to build the game terrain:
Implementation
At the moment, I have elements of the starting screen where the user gets to pick what cat they want to be: when a mouse hovers over a certain cat it moves up and down. As I mentioned earlier, the most time-consuming part of this project is getting these images and cropping them in a way that I can use them in arrays. For example, to get these cats on the screen (
) I had to crop the big picture into smaller parts that are of uniform size and spaced out evenly. Once I am done with preparing the images, coding the program should not be a challenge.
Future Plans
- Add beach elements like palm trees, ponds, seashells, etc that the cat can interact with
- Add cat “status” of its needs that need to be fulfilled in the game (if not fulfilled the cat dies 🙁 )
These are the basic required functionalities of the game, however, there is a lot more that I wish to implement like making the game multiplayer, adding new characters (birds) that I have the resources for in terms of spritesheets. Whether they will come to life or not will depend on the time restrictions, but I am very excited to see how this project will turn out in the end!