• Poto, an interdimensional space cat  that collects a powerful essence in these dimensions called “Aether” has been summoned back by some old friends to do some favors.

• Created in a week for Epic’s Megajam 2019.

Download & Play here: https://bioxide.itch.io/potodontdie

• Main Idea

I wanted to make a game in which my cat was the protagonist, at the same time I was inspired by old school platformers such as Banjo Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day. I grabbed a few asset packs and started iterating on the mechanics, I knew I wanted to make heavy use of the gravity mechanics provided by one of the packs, after a day or so, I ended up creating the hook mechanics, which took the game on a different direction I wasn’t expecting. 

• Level Design

Level design was the last thing I worked on, as I spent most of the development time in the testing area refining the game mechanics. I combined multiple asset packs and heavily tweaked the Post-Process settings and lighting to make sure they look a bit different than the default assets. I wanted the levels to be disorienting and make heavy use of the gravity, plasma hook and jetpack mechanics, allowing players to get creative in how they’ll traverse through the environment.

• Programming

The entire game was built using blueprints in Unreal Engine 4, blueprints allowed me to quickly build the core mechanics during the game-jam since I only had a week to finish the game.

• Animation Programming

I retargeted the cat skeleton to an animation pack and refined the deformations till it looked decent. After that, I went over the animation blueprint and programmed additional tweaks to the IK to ensure the cat’s animations were close to 1:1 compared to the animation pack.