Catstronaut

A 3D platformer inspired by Mario 64

Pitch: “As a corporate astronaut, jump around colorful planets to collect your lost cargo. Avoid the clingy goobers and become employee of the month!“

The Team

7 Programmers
3 Level Designers
3 Animators
5 Artists
3 Technical Artists

Production Time:

15 weeks (4h/day)

Engine:

In-house engine made by the team.

Unreal Engine as level editor.

Main contributions

Designed Level 1.
Worked closely with the other disciplines to create the narrative of the game.
Used our engines visual scripting to create scripted events.
Helped with set-dressing in level 1 & created environmental storytelling beats.
Created blueprints in Unreal Engine that helped other disciplines work more efficiently.

Game coming soon on itch!

Pre-production

Paper design

Top Down before blocking out in engine. I took a lot of inspiration from Super Mario Odyssey’s level “Wooded Kingdom” and wanted to make the a level that loops.

Blocking out in-engine

Here is a rough version of the level from Unreal Engine, this was pretty early in production so the player movement wasn’t ready yet.

Narrative

Brainstorming

I was part of the narrative taskforce for this game project where we had meetings and brainstormed ideas for our game. I usually always end up in these taskforces since it’s something I am very passionate about.

I love world building since I believe it helps to create a great experience and believe it to be an important part of Level Design.

Collaborating

Why I love to be a part of the narrative team is because I can tell an idea I have, then someone expands on it and vice versa. For this project we wanted to create a light hearted game.

In this taskforce we had at least one person from each discipline so that we know what is reasonable and what’s not within the time frame.

Setting characteristics

While playing Super Mario Odyssey I was looking for some inspiration for the Level Design, but also funny moments that could be implemented to our game. I saw the boombox and I immediately suggested that the main character should love music and this gave us a lot of ideas on how the players characteristics were.

Putting it all together

The Storyboard is created by Minoo, the animator that was responsible for the cinematics in the game. This ties in to the Cats characteristic which is that they are obsessed with music. We also wanted the Cat to be clumsy hence why they are parked in a “No Parking” zone.

Mushroom Planet

Funny personalities

We wanted to showcase the goobers funny personality by portraying them as wholesome creatures. They also run towards the cat trying to hug them because they think the cat is cute. However since the goobers aren’t very smart they’re hurting the cat.

The orange mushroom also shows that they are jumpable.

Dance, dance

Everybody loves music and our protagonist is no different!

Radioactive waste

The evil B.O.B Corp has dumped fish oil in the lake leading to the poor goobers dying when they went for a swim. Pretty sad.

This also shows that the water is dangerous. Making the player aware that they will die if they jump into it.

Exploited by B.O.B Corp

Working closely with artists, we wanted to show that B.O.B Corp used to be on this planet and extract resources. . Once they were done they simply left everything and we get to see it deteriorated.