Intergalactic Paws

Check out the gameplay trailer!

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What is Intergalactic Paws?

Intergalactic Paws is a demolition derby driving game set on Earth's moon. The premise is that you, the driver representing Earth -- the best feline derby driver ever to compete, must win the derby against alien enemies or else Earth will be targeted for invasion and possibly destroyed for good! You will drive in two modes of gravity against enemies that want to eliminate you. Eliminate all the enemies and spawn the boss early, or survive half the match and contend with the boss enemy and any remaining enemies in low gravity! Our inspiration came from a few games: Twisted Metal, Rocket  League, and Kerbal Space Program. These sources of inspiration led us to create a unique take on "space survival" theme.

Our First Game - Building a Tech Demo

We began by building the most basic aspects of the game. This included a terrain generator so that we could test different sizes for the crater, vary the bumpiness, etc. so that we could easily fine-tune the level to make it performant and effective. We then focused on physics -- movement, collisions, etc. The video below showcases the first playable version of Intergalactic Paws, even if there's not much to do yet.

The First Playtest - Time To Show It Off

The game began to come together rather quickly once the core mechanics were implemented. We ran into some issues  with game performance reported by almost every player. After some investigation we found that the 3D models were far too dense in geometry, despite their "low poly" look. We were able to reduce the geometry of all the models in the game by an average of 80%. This resulted in immediate performance gains and produced a playable game -- even in web browsers! The video below shows off the game in a very playable state, though a few bells and whistles had not yet been implemented.

Results of Playtesting - Round 1

Good Impressions Enemy AI  and terrain generation Menu and pause menu Camera Motions Physics

Critiques Improve frame rate Needs boundary to keep player in Define the goal Needs game story/Reason to play Needs Win/Lose conditions Needs better AI

Reflecting on results

After doing the playtesting with the class we got a lot of feedback that having a 3D game looks really cool and that the UI for the game looks professional. The players also enjoyed the player mechanics, how the physics work and that the player can use the mouse to look around.

We learned from this playtest that we needed to optimize the game to play better on slower PCs and for the WebGL build. Testers also asked for a boundary to keep the players in the crater during the game. Another critique we got was to make the goal of the game more clear, so that players know the goal of the game, and why they are in a demo derby. After this round of testing, we also heard that players would like better AI from the enemies. This playtesting experience highlighted many things we need to work on in the following weeks. We will start optimizing the game and making the goal of the game more clear.

Results of Playtesting - Round 2

Good Impressions 3D models look cool Mechanics work for a demo derby Visually good Feels good to play Graphics are cool Polished

Critiques Damage indicators User experience & health Better AI Fix lagging frame rate Sensitivity was too high Hard to control the vehicle

Reflecting on results

This round of playtesting showed us that players enjoyed the graphics, how the game looks and how it plays. Overall, most mechanics are implemented and the goal of the game is clear.

The major feedback we received from testers was to continue to optimize the game so that it runs smoother on computers and WebGL. We are currently working on getting this fixed so more people can play the game. We also learned that the controls were still too difficult for players to control the car as well as the camera sensitivity. With this in mind, we are going to attempt to implement a slider that allows the player to control the mouse sensitivity for the camera. We are also working on getting the physics for gravity and the mass of the car to work well to help with controllability. We have already started to implement damage indicators including a health bar and smoke/fire particle systems to show the damage being caused, we just did not have this done for the playtest.

Feedback survey & Results of survey

Credits & Attributions

All content of Intergalactic Paws was made by the team using Blender 2.92, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, and Unity 2020.3.5f1 with the exception of the music being made by artist Slantis [link] specifically for Intergalactic Paws.

Class Presentation

The slideshow for our class presentation can be found [here].

Team Reflection

While creating this game, as a team, we have learned the importance of criticism and communication. There were a few times during development where we disagreed on how to implement certain features, or just weren't very clear in communicating the needs of the game. By sending the game out for playtesting and feedback, we took the time to ask the testers their input on our thoughts for the game. We took the feedback from the testers and used that to make certain decisions for us. This game was developed with everything created by our team from scratch, we did not use free Unity assets, which ultimately made development and crunch times that much harder to manage. However, I think that we successfully were able to develop and launch a fun and playable game.

View our development log [here].