RATCRAFT
made in unity 2d
Sole Designer
🐀 A cozy singleplayer simulation game where you, a wizard rat, run a potion shop for all the little critters in town. Use your cauldron and wand to summon various ingredients and craft powerful potions to help your local community. There’s a progression mode where you unlock new ingredients and potions and a challenge mode where you complete as many orders as you can in a given time limit.
Team of 6
We were given approximately 4 weeks to rapidly prototype, iterate, and develop a demo of this game.
Apr. 2022 – May 2022
Given the prompt of having to use an alternative controller (anything except for a mouse/keyboard or controller), we used a Makey-Makey to create our own.
Designing the game
Core mechanic
After a lot of brainstorming, our team landed on wanting to draw shapes using 6 different points, contextualizing this around a wizard crafting potions. I took a basic prototype to testing to determine what kind of shapes players felt were intuitive and fun to draw on the custom controller.
simulation shop
We formed the main gameplay loop around a classic shop cycle. After each “day” of serving customers, the player meets a new creature, who provides a new ingredient unlocking new potions as well. We also added a “challenge” mode where players have to serve as many customers as possible within a given time limit.
TUTORIAL
Using text boxes and predetermined interactions, the player is introduced to the controls slowly, as it is an entirely custom controller. Leaning into the cozy vibes, I used calm and relaxed language and actions to engage the player with the gameplay aesthetics and shop environment.
Additional Work
OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES
Weekly QA testing at Champlain College Games Testing Lab with analysis
Backlog management, user story creation, and wiki upkeep in Redmine
UI mockups gameplay and menus that artists and programmers referenced