Purrsonality

There really wasn't an inspiration for this game, we decided on multiple things such as a dating sim for cats (which we thought was weird) and ended up going for a visual novel.

Essentially at it's core, the visual novel-type game is aimed to enforce your personality type. The decisions we created were based on the 5 big personality archetypes

How we built it

We had trouble settling on a theme, sifting through multiple games to get an idea of what we felt was purrfect. Another issue was choosing the personality types we wanted to use for the game. We had made an initial plan of having each cat having a specific personality and we ran into the 5 big archetypes and started using that one instead. Finding the art style was also a difficulty in our journey; there are lots of art styles depicting cats that we wanted to use but we had a hard time finding one that fit the aesthetic we wanted to project, so we ended up making our own. Since we drew it ourselves, there's a lack of expression but the authenticity is there.

We are proud of finishing it. Jokes aside, the art aspect of our cats is one we're proud of since it was completely done free-handed. Our team wasn't composed entirely of comp sci/software engineers so we had our work cut out for us, learning a new a skill the day of. Despite the long arguments of deciding what we wanted for our game, we're proud of the fact that we were at least able to come to a consensus. Another point we're proud of was the dialogue - We wanted them to at least feel real, or maybe somewhat, so we avoided using any sort AI for that part.

This was our first project together as a whole and most of us have known each other since high school. We learned that despite knowing each other for a while, you can get mad at each and still be okay with ourselves later in the day. Arguing is fine, knowing when you're wrong is also fine and in fact encouraged. As long as you're okay with each at the end of the day, whatever argument you had was solely for the project and not in any shape or form personal.

For some of us, it was also their first time creating multiple characters and having to branch off the decisions of the character - so the work was more than what they were expecting. Prior, they've been working solely on games with no interaction with other non player characters.

Hopefully, we want the change the dialogue to feel less straightforward for the story - and be more authentic between people (or cats).