Petisfactory
Petisfactory is a 2D game developed IDZ Digital, A game full of simple activities revolving around pets. The player would complete simple activities per level to progress forward.
Target Audience :
Pet Lovers, Casual Puzzle players, Adults and Teens, Casual Gamers, People seeking stress relief,
Age Group :
Adults and Teens but all ages can play
Platform :
Android
Genre :
Casual, Relaxation, Stylised, Pets, Single Player, Cosy
GamePlay
Players engage in tasks like tidying up, solving jigsaw puzzles, and interacting with objects and animals in calming ways.
My Role : Lead Game Designer
Team size : 6
Technicals
Game Type : 2D
Engine : Unity
Full Resolution - 1152 x 2560 - both portrait and landscape
My Responsibilities :
To plan the project pipe line
To Ideate as many levels as possible and turn the ideas into concepts
To create a playable prototype for it’s approval
To coordinate the efforts of the Artists, Programmers and Animators
To Playtest the game and provide feedback to the team for changes
To Coordinate with the marketing team for the game’s release
Tracking Player activity via Firebase and making improvements
Project Pipeline
Pre-Production
Ideation ------ > Conceptualisation ------ > Game Design Document ------ > Approval
Production
Graphical Prototype ------ > Coding Prototype ----- > Play-Testing ----- > Changes
Post-Production
QA-Testing ----- > Bug Fixes -----> Marketing ----- > Release ------ > Firebase Tracking
Ideation and Conceptualisation
I would spend hours going through platforms like pinterest, Youtube and searching for inspiration for my game, I’d also play other games for inspiration, ultimately there was another game known as Satisgame which I did take much inspiration from, it had simple activities, and was considered relaxing and satisfying to play through, I decided to take the formula from satisgame and turn it into a pet themed game, with simple activities based around pets, plus who doesn’t like cute looking animals on their screen? The puzzles are designed to be simple and easy for the player to understand.
Here’s an Idea with a simple illustration made in canva, there would be cats hiding in the living room in various places such as behind furniture , there would be a can of cat food down with a scent that will fish out the cats as soon as u hover the tuna can around the hiding spot for a few seconds
After coordinating with the team’s Concept / Graphic artist, this is the final appearance of the level, the cats would be hiding in various places as shown in the picture, the player would simply have to hover the cat food around the hiding spot and the cat would come out. In the starting of the level, the cats would be well hidden.
I made a playable prototype in figma, with one case where the cats would be well hidden and another where their ears were visible, and guess what? No one could figure out what to do when the cats were well hidden, so I went with the second option
Another challenge was players wouldn’t understand if they were playing the game correctly when they would hover the cat food around the hiding the spot, to counter this I proposed the following
To increase the detection box for the cats
To reduce the time required for the hovering from 5s --- > 2.5
To create a slight “shaking” animation of their ears when the food can entered their detection box, which was such a huge help for visual feedback for the player
These changes fixed this level, almost everyone in the firm could guess what to do in a few seconds while others took a little longer, but this level is just an example of the few challenges I encountered during development of Petisfaction
Art Style and Ui
The game would have a simple hand drawn like appearance, which would make it visually pleasing for the player which is important as this game is supposed to be a casual, relaxing and cozy. So I sat down with my graphic artist and gave him a few references and ultimately this is final look that we decided to go with. The red borders you’re seeing in the left image with the cat paws is simply the safe zone resolution to ensure the game would look proper on most devices and was a visual reference for the programmer and not seen in game .
Playtesting
In the first playable prototype of the game, the feedback was mostly mixed, several players simply found the confusing from a visual feedback point of view, this meant that I had to come up with solutions here and there, here’s another quick example
Marketing
After getting the game playtested and QA tested, we were ready to go forward with the release. We came up with an app icon, which is a dog and a cat, and as they are primary pets in people’s homes it would resonate the most with players
The game also needed a feature graphic and a few screenshots for the Google play store, in order to adhere with the release deadline, we decided to use the game’s levels for the play store screenshots
The game also needed firebase integration, however as the team’s programmer was a novice and would take some time in integrating it deeply, we decided to go for a simpler solution since at launch the game would get very few downloads until app store optimisation would kick in, this could give the programmer some time to integrate firebase deeply, so in the meantime we showed our game to the firm’s ceo who approved it and we decided to go with a simple “Want more content?” Pop up when the player would finish the release game’s levels. It was basic but it would help for now. We pushed for firebase integration in the next update pretty soon and are creating more levels. The game was planned to have 600 levels but on launch we decided to go with 25
In this level, the player would simply tap and the pig would do a skipping animation, the player needed to repeat this multiple times, this was visually confusing for the player as they wouldn’t know when to stop skipping or when the level was complete, so I sat down with my graphic artist and the animator, I proposed that the stomach of the pig be made into a seperate layer in unity above a much smaller stomach, the animator would then create an animation of the stomach becoming smaller with constant skips, the stomach layer on top would then get destroyed when the player was very close to finishing their skips and so the pig would look thin as he had done some serious workout.
I also asked the programmer to reduce the number of skips needed from 25 ---> 20
It turns out these solutions worked, after presenting the game to a seperate group of testers, all of them were able to understand that their inputs were affecting the pig which just gave the player much better visual feedback. This just another example of the challenge I faced in improving visual feedback for the player.
