Summer at Catmai: Fishing Purrrfected
My Responsibilities
I was the lead Level Designer for Summer at Catmai: Fishing Purrrfected, a Devhouse original IP built in Unity. The game is a third-person, cozy adventure game set during a young teenage girl's summer getaway. My responsibilities included:
Building fun levels through paper designs, blockmeshes, and iteration.
Providing leadership and feedback in the design team; Establishing what “fun” is and player direction through level flow, pacing, sightlines, and gameplay.
Supporting narrative needs through progression, pacing, and gameplay, using methods including environmental storytelling, cinematography, dialogue, and color.
Owning the the camera placement setup across all built levels, from ideation through multiple experimental and iterative passes.
Creating and implementing level design processes to facilitate efficient design practices.
Development Breakdown:
Concept and Level Design
Paper Concept
Every level began as a concept pitch; Another designer and myself created the pitch decks and presented them to the development team and leads. As development continued, the documents were regularly updated, and covered:
A paper drawing of the level’s conceptual layout
Points of interest and narrative beats, including story progression gates
A comprehensive list of unique art assets needed to realize the design and gameplay goals
NPCs present in the level, including information on where specific characters will be at certain times throughout the narrative progression
Other gameplay locations, including player fishing locations and collectibles
Blockmesh
We created blockmeshes from our paper concepts using the ProBuilder plugin for Unity. Modelling and coloring the blockouts in-engine enabled us to realize our designs with much faster iterations. The flexibility of instant model changes allowed us to refine the organic shapes of the environments.
I owned responsibility for the core levels in the world that carry players from the very beginning through roughly the first 1/3 of the story. The designs of these levels in particular are critical for player interest, engagement, and retainment, as well as being intended for frequent travel by players. Every level experienced 2-3 major revisions and iterations. One of these, treated as a hub area, was completely restarted 3 times.
Storytelling and Gameplay
In order to support the strong narrative themes, we incorporated as much storytelling into the environment as possible. This included details about the environments’ constructions, habitants, props, narrative beats, and player interactions. The design team researched and took heavy inspiration from real world places and objects similar to the environments the game features.
The design team used a series of beat sheets and character heat maps created by the game writer to determine where characters are required to be for certain story beats, and what characters we were allowed to add elsewhere for players to interact with while exploring. These gameplay moments outside of the primary story beats opened the door to countless world building opportunities in our designs, such as populating the city center with character-owned shops and services, or encountering characters seemingly on their own quest.
Props and Art Layout
During blockout, we used placeholder art assets and other block-ins to fill the environment art gaps. Any block-in or specified asset was added to the level design document for that level, along with a short description and any reference images. While populating the documents with assets, a full concept art team was dedicated to concepting assets for the 3D art team. Every kind of asset was documented for concepts to create a cohesive list of art across the entire game:
Props, environment pieces, and buildings
POIs and narrative items
NPCs and interactables
As art leads and directors approved concepts, we were able to replace some prop block-ins with relative scale versions using the concept sketches. This enabled us to adjust our gameplay spaces rapidly as new concept and 3D assets made their way into the project. With POIs, NPCs, props, and environment details blocked out, the next phase was to create Unity Terrain assets to match the world we had made. I created terrain assets for the first iterations of 3 levels, as well as iterating on the terrain used in the game’s publisher demo, which can be seen on the Steam page here.
Cameras
Summer at Catmai uses the Cinemachine plugin to manage the player’s camera. One of the most iterated factors of the game’s cameras is transitioning between cameras in within a level. Our testers were suffering from motion sickness, and others felt lost in the levels from some of the twisting camera angles in early explorations. I spent several weeks iterating on different camera setups to establish some best practices, including:
Camera angles relative to the camera
Distances from the character to the camera
Best ways to frame POIs and vistas
Smooth camera transitions
Transitioning across levels
The engineering team developed a camera transition tool that the project’s lead designer used to create a 2-axis camera dolly system for level design use. One camera dolly spline is locked in place, while another dolly spline carries the camera across, allowing for a wide range of camera movements. Each level was assigned a 90 degree cone from which no cameras were allowed to rotate outside of.
Keeping all cameras in a given level facing the same direction allowed us to retain the player’s direction, and redesign POIs and scenery in a way that can foreshadow and lead players forward. Camera transitions between levels typically did not exceed 45 degrees. A medium sized level typically ended with somewhere between 15 and 25 camera zones at the end of the last iteration.
Demo
During development, I assisted the secondary team working on a publisher demo. The demo was lacking player direction, gameplay interest, and fun factors. I was given almost total freedom to make design changes and additions, including:
Planning and executing a new player direction and experience
Modifying the terrain to influence new directional needs
Rearranging pathway blockers and sightlines
Adding new fishing locations
New gameplay interactions and objectives
Placing and rearranging NPC locations
Overall, my contributions successfully pushed the demo in the right direction and helped establish design practices for creating levels in the full game.
