Shurikats

Shurikats was a mini 1-day project to test how far I could take a concept in such a short time and to improve my level design skills.

The theme of Shurikats came about from a random 3 word prompt, that being “cat, bike, and run”. 
This theme was initially tied more thoroughly to the game with a story consisting of the cat seeing a lovely piece of fish that they fall in love with, however, while daydreaming about taking the big fish home the cat realises that it’s no longer in the shop. Looking around the cat realises that a man has taken the fish and strapped it to his back, the man gets on his bike and starts to ride away. Fearing that they won’t get to see the fish ever again, the cat tries to run after the man but quickly trips over a small pebble throwing them into a spin.
This would be when the game starts with the player having to dash, crouch, and jump over and past obstacles to reach the man’s home and eat the big fishy at the end of the game.

As the game was made in such a short time, I decided the most important thing to do was prioritise different aspects of the game, and unfortunately, that meant that the story of the game and my idea for a small animated introduction had to be cut. Furthermore, it also meant that I did not have the time to create all the art by myself, so I turned to ​opengameart.org for the parallax backgrounds. As I was making the game fast-paced, the other objects would not be something that the player would have much time to scrutinize and as such I made quick ‘programmer art’ for those.

In general, I believe that Shurikats was a project of compromise, the goal was to see how far I could push myself in the limited time that I had, and that’s exactly what I did.

The aspect of this game that I put the most time into was designing and playtesting the level, which I spent possibly around 2/3rds of the entire project on. After finishing the project and having a chance to look over it again, I’m not quite sure that I made the right decision as since the game is very challenging, few if any people will ever see the entire thing whereas visuals are something that every player will become intimately familiar with.