Virtual Cat Cafe

Inspiration

The original inspiration behind virtual cat cafes is as you guessed it, irl cat cafes! I've also always wanted to build some sort of productivity motivator tool, and there's no better motivator than some furry cuteness keeping you company on your screen as you study!

What it does

Virtual Cat Cafe allows the user to spawn a cat and navigate it through a world full of cafes, by pressing key commands ('w' for jump, 'd' for running right and 'a' for running left). Reminiscent of games like stardew valley and neko atsume, Virtual Cat Cafe is a jump into the paws of feline companionship and nostalgia.

How we built it

I used javascript for the sprite animation and game room transitions and the Tiled map editor to create my own custom map using assets from itch.io.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first time building a multi-room platformer game style project, and the calculations that went into detecting object collisions with map boundaries and mimicing freefall gravity for sprite jumps were the most challenging part at first. However, an unexpected challenge turned out to be calibrating the dimensions of the game sprite and map assets to be just right in order to allow for smooth transition of animation frames and consistent environment scale. As I was using custom assets from itch.io, I had to create the game map from scratch in Tiled, and had to adjust and crop the sprite pngs to work well with the frame rate and buffer settings I had for the animations. It was really difficult to get the cat to move in a natural looking way without glitches, so this was definitely the biggest challenge of this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of picking up an area that was so new to me before. I've never created game sprite-level animations or created game maps or coded transitions of animation frames. I look forward to continuing to explore more game-centric coding projects.

What we learned

I learned a lot about creating multi-room platformer games -- specifically, the physics of object movement, calculating collision boundaries given a game map, and even designing my own game maps using assets from itch.io and the tiled map editor.

What's next for Virtual Cat Cafe

The next steps are to support allowing users to create and join study sessions where they can interact with another user's pets in a virtual study cafe of their choice. Users will have the ability to create their custom productivity, feline-motivated workspace by dragging and dropping widgets such as a group chat, jira board, pomodoro timer, and video chat into the space around the cat room.

Built With

• html
• javascript
• tiled