Shaman Cat -Work in Progress – 19.12.13 

My cat game makes nice progress, even due I spend a lot of time on social media spreading the word about my game and my blog. This unfortunately also leads to a lot of tapping on random time wasters. Channeling the own focus mainly on what has to be done requires a lot of self discipline.

As I write this I’m sitting in the train from Berlin Germany to Zurich Switzerland my home. In my cabin is sitting a girl, using the same macbook air model as mine, both MacBooks are placed on this small table in the middle of the cabin, that looks pretty important and fancy. So using this adjectives let’s have a look at my newest game project.

Chapter 1: My stolen love

Each chapter of the game will be a separate screen with a narrative title and a lightly animated background, from here you have access to the 4 levels which each chapter contains.

Narrative wise the first chapter is all about chasing behind the evil granny which has stolen the boyfriend of the female cat hero. Gameplay wise the player will learn the basic game mechanics and get the first additionally spells within this chapter, rounded up by a boss fight at the end of it.

So far I plan to kick off the game with 3 chapters, resulting in 12 levels. I will create a certain play duration for the game by having the difficulty rising dramaticaly from the second half of chapter 2 upwards. Leaving the player with levels he has to try multiple times over and over again to complete them. I also plan to patch new chapters to the game, over a time span of at least 3 months, which will be additional 3 chapters, resulting in total 6 chapters and 24 levels. Patching content after release has a few benefits, the community will be able to identify more strongly with the game because its still growing and developing, each time a game gets patched the game rises up in search engines and you can feed your created marketing channels with updates and news which will keep them alive and hopefully expanding.

Battle gameplay foundation

The gameplay is design wise similar as in my first game #TheShaMan. But this time there will be 2 modes the player can switch between during battle.

The regenerative and offensive mode, depending on the acive mode the available spells will change, the player will need to switch between them to be successful. Additionally there is a new energy system, the player builds up 1 energy for each standard attack (claw bash) all other spells cost energy. My goal is to make the spells really empowering and the choices as meaningful as possible.