Cat Burglar
Cat Burglar is a prototype of a puzzle game about robbing a bank with only a cat and a laser pointer as tools. The player switches between limited perspectives of a room marked by vents on the walls, then uses a laser pointer from there to guide the cat towards valuables and away from danger, such as night guards and traps.
Gameplay Video
My Process
On Cat Burglar, I designed the vents system for viewing the game and worked with the team to determine how scoring would operate. I iterated over the way players would be able to see the rooms, going from having a rotating perspective, to having a moving perspective from a fixed direction, to ultimately settling on the limited perspectives within the rooms. I decided it was valuable to be able to choose what we could limit the player from seeing from certain angles, making it so that choosing how to view the room could be part of the puzzles.
The game was originally meant to have randomly generated levels, but just like the camera, control of what the player needed to do to solve the puzzles was most important.
I came up with a handful of other too ideas, such a laser that the cat would run away from rather than towards, but we decided to keep the game simple and easier to understand for our prototype. If we had gone forward to develop the game further, these ideas might have been used.
This prototype was made in Unity by a team of students at Bradley University. Though it was not finished, you can play it on Windows here.