In this Fall session of MonRiverGames we are working on putting together a beta version of Spy Cats, Remastered- beyond the vertical slice currently on itch.io. The goal is to get an early release ready for our Steam page for playtesting. Spy Cats is one of our older projects and was started by last year's Fall 2022 Capstone Group. In Spring 2023, community members started working on a more polished vertical slice of the concept. After our onboarding into MonRiverGames this session, our project group came to the conclusion:
We need to put the "spy" back in Spy Cats.
To achieve this, we have readjusted our scope from the original game. Instead of around 9 different platforming levels that Original Spy Cats had, we decided on 3 levels beyond our Egyptian themed tutorial level aka vertical slice. These are each meant to be around the same length as our Remastered vertical slice and gear more towards the puzzle aspect of platformers. Each level will be a series of sneaky puzzle like events or tasks that the player will have to go through in order to accomplish the mission. This will mainly be done through the addition of gadgets and level design.
The player will obtain a unique gadget for each mission that they can use in creative ways to problem solve throughout the level. We are currently in the process of coming up with these gadgets and puzzles to really Spy our Cats up. Here is a picture of some of the ideas that we have come up with so far.
We are currently prototyping some of the more simple ideas that we are confident that we want in the game. Backing that up, we have a dedicated art team continually making new assets- both audio and visual to set the spy mood. Our designers are making level concepts and story scripts to help bring it all together.
This direction of the game will more accurately hit our original concept's target while not setting up too lofty of a goal (ie. 9 missions all as good as the vertical slice of Spy Cats, Remastered) to achieve in the short time we have with the studio. Many of us on the team are graduating from WVU either this Fall or in the Spring and will likely (and hopefully) move on to full time employment somewhere. We want to make the most of the time we still have here! We're looking forward to helping to put the Spy back in Spy Cats, Remastered but outputting something with a more clean than our original Spy Cats. We are also looking forward to our first Steam release!
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