Creature Capture

A cave
Music
Tilemap
Procedurally generated terrain
Level Select Menu
The pet garden
A full view of a level
An early test of spawning player and creatures
Testing functions out on Desmos for random generation

Inspiration

I was inspired to make this project after hearing about games that focus on a completely non competitive or combative side of things with as little room for stress as possible. I learnt that they are very good for helping people calm down, relax and unwind.

What it does

My game ended up allowing players to traverse procedurally generated levels in order to collect critters that they could then keep as pets in their pet garden. There are different pets available in each environment and some are much rarer to spawn than others.

How I built it

The key part I had to build was the level generation. After discussing this with others I settled on using the sum of sin functions which created various nice patterns that creatures and the player could be easily placed into. The other core part of the game was how the player could interact with the world. I added the feature to break apart terrain so that they could find creatures stuck in caves and the ability to fly so they could find creatures in high up places!

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was finding a good way of of generating terrain. I decided to use Unity's tile map system as it would allow me to easily place tiles once I'd procedurally generated their placement positions. After a lot of discussion with others and testing with Desmos we worked out a good formula to create patterns (f(x)=ksSin(mx+ny+c)). Adding several of these formulas together and comparing to a y coordinate created really nice terrain.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm very proud that I built this project almost completely myself, including all of the art and music, some of which I adapted from previous things I'd worked on to save time. I think it fits really well into the game and makes it look like very professional for a prototype built in just under 24 hours.