Whisker President
A game about helping a cat do its presidential duties while keeping distractions at bay.
About
Current Status: Released!
My role was a Design Lead in charge of making gameplay design decisions alongside a Programmer to assist with script creation. Being in this role has been one of the most enjoyable experiences ever! I got to come up with new and interesting ideas for mechanics, such as a randomized bill generation system, cat attention system, and a simple economy to serve as the backdrop for your gameplay. It was also fun prototyping the initial gameplay prototype because we were still figuring out the technical backend for our project at the time. We were on a tight deadline, so rather than going to our first meeting without anything to play or present, I decided to come up with a physical prototype to demonstrate what our game could look like. This physical prototype became a staple of our development process, allowing us to test specific but important gameplay features, such as possible player actions, cat behavior, win conditions, and distractions all without requiring time and effort put into implementing these ideas into digital prototypes. It came into clutch when we decided to overhaul our fundamental gameplay mechanics in order to address some problems we had with our existing gameplay. Having a physical prototype allowed us to playtest this new iteration of our gameplay loop without requiring a stable gameplay build, and by the time we were ready to implement this new gameplay iteration, we had recieved and incorporated lots of invaluable feedback from playtests on our physical prototype.
This is a senior project started for UCSC. It is a project I collaborated on with 13 other people, whom I am proud to work with.
Links
You can play our game on our Itch.io page, or on our Steam page below. It's free!