Into The Catacombs

Into The Catacombs

Into the Catacombs is a networked two-player cooperative stealth puzzler where players must work together to infiltrate a heavily guarded pyramid.

Taking place in ancient Egypt, a peaceful society of cat people has been invaded by roman rats led by the wicked tyrant, Julius Cheesar. In order to rescue baby kittens that have been taken purrisoner, two courageous cats must sneak past rat guards and solve the pyramid’s puzzles as they go deeper…into the catacombs.

Unity
JollyCoopCo. – 8 Person Team
Sep 2022 – Nov 2022

My role

My role on the team was the design & QA lead. I was responsible for helping guide the main mechanics of the game while also continually bringing the game to testing for feedback.

What I worked on

I helped design the main mechanics of the game, being the puzzle elements of pressure plates players can stand on and levers they can flip to turn on power lines. Those power lines would open doors and move moving platforms. These also include a unique ability for each player, for one player being a box they can place and push that they can teleport back to at a later point. The other player had a hook they could use to pull levers and boxes from a distance. While the team enjoyed the player abilities, they were cut late into the project due to difficulties getting it functional with networking. All the design and sound documentation created throughout the process was my responsibility. On top of that, all the prep, attendance and documentation resulting from QA was also one of my roles.

How I felt about the project

This project had caused a lot of difficulties for our team. I see this project as something that threw a lot of challenges at me and the team that we managed to overcome. Very early on in the project we committed to making it networked. The issue was that for a significant portion of the project the build a majority of the team was developing in was not the same as the build with networking in it, causing a lot of difficulties when it came to trying to merge them together. This also caused issues with testing throughout the project as we weren’t testing networked builds until the very end when we were trying to scramble everything together. And with the volatile state the build was in during this point, sometimes we didn’t have certain things we wanted in for testing.

That on top of issues such as using sound middleware we had never used before such as FMOD or switching the entire package we were using for networking mid-project really added a lot of stress to the team. Despite a lot of the issues we ran into throughout this process though, I am really proud of the game we created. Especially as my first project with networking.