I spent about a month and a half on this project, with a lot of work being done basically daily!

I was playing a LOT of Katamari Damacy Reroll, and since that remake was done in unity I wanted to see if I could make it myself! So I set out with my awful little laptop (I left my PC at college)  and clunked away for most waking hours. Taking break days when I needed and playing through Pathologic Classic as I did.

I started with the name "Dragon's Den" and then remembered that was the name of an adult store so I quickly changed it to Firen's New Home as a placeholder. If I continue this project I will probably change it again because that's an awful name.

Firen, the dragon, was meant to run around either on top of, or behind the ball similar to the Prince from Katamari, but I couldn't get it to work before I went back to school so he's not there :(

I wish I could talk a little more about the process of building it, but it was pretty simple! Make a ball that grows when you pick things up that are smaller than you! I initially followed a tutorial on Youtube that had the traditional Katamari ball technique of items becoming the ball and rolling funky and all that, but the way they did it was Really poor and was absolutely unusable for a game. Instead of using that I just scrapped it and used a placeholder way of things just getting absorbed into the ball. I would really like to find out the specifics of how they did the ball in Katamari though...

The "level" that I made was just me spewing a ton of objects onto a field to test the game and a small play area to figure out how I would want to make levels. Did you know that there is surprisingly little talk about KD's amazing level design? At least relative to other pretty massively loved games, there wasn't really a lot! So I just kind of winged it and tried my best with the techniques that they seemed to have employed (lead players with lines of objects and entice them with large objects). The level is pretty obviously largely unbalanced.

When it comes to modeling, I think I just made a lot of little low poly objects in Blender to scale! I used Pribambase to attach Aseprite to Blender and got to work! I really wanted to get a similar feel to KD but also wanted to make the textures pixel art since I think that is a really neat style that needs more love. The grass texture that I use in the game and on the game's page is a free asset that I found on the unity store. I wish I remembered where I found it but I do not I am so sorry asset developer :(

I think that's about it? I didn't have any major developmental issues or anything and the Trello board I made helped me keep things on track for this prototype. I would like to take this project farther, maybe for capstone, but I think it might be out of scope for something like that. Maybe I'll make Party Cups 3 instead.

Thanks for reading! And if you're a company reviewing my portfolio, please hire me! I love you!

-Carri