Development Process

 

Variations on a Theme

The theme for the 100 hour game jam was "cycles."  We started by brainstorming novel directions we could take the theme in order for our game to stand out among the others.  Eunice suggested the idea of portraying the cycle of debt that professional models.  The only hesitation we had was that we didn't want it to be too depressing, but once we discovered we could have the main character be a cat instead of a human and the game could be called "cat walk," we jumped on the idea.

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Driven by UI

We knew the UI was going to be of critical importance in the game, so, as a team, we mocked up UI layouts while designing the game's fashion and job system. 

 

This proved to be extremely helpful.  Since we all knew exactly what the game was going to look like and how the players would interact with the game, we were able to work efficiently towards a clear goal.

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Ambitious Scope

While our team did an excellent job of working towards a shared vision, we over-scoped the project a fair amount.  Due to this, we had to cut a number of features from the game that we initially wanted.

 

The most notable was a whole system of clothing styles coming in and out of fashion on seasonal chart.  The player would be able to see what style was in fashion, what style just fell out of fashion, and what style was soon to be in fashion in the next week.  And there would certain companies whose whims would be dictated by the seasonal chart.  All of this had to be cut purely due to time constraints.

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Playtesting Feedback

Even in our extremely truncated development cycle, we knew we wanted to get the game in front of people to learn about the clarity of the game's systems and UI.  We sent the UI mock ups to people and asked them what they thought was going on.

 

From playtests, we learned that players had trouble determining what clothing items were head-wear and what were body-pieces.  So we added a small symbol in the inventory to communicate this.

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