Hello, everyone!

As always, I am going to make a post mortem of our new game, this time is Paw Pals turn!

For this game, we teamed up with Martín Martelletti, Hugo Miraballes, Nicolás Rivero, Astrid Oliveira, Alan Rosas, Lautaro Bravo de la Serna, Santiago Bravo de la Serna and me.

The game was created for the GMTK Jam 2021 and the theme was Joined Together

About the game

Paw Pals is a game where you manage a bunch of kitties trapped on the top of a tree. Your goal is to investigate enough of the big book of  “How to get down of a tree for dummy kitties” while making sure your kitties have enough food.

But here is the catch: Your kitties have personalities and some of them may not be too happy about working with others therefore making them feel more and more stressed. High levels of stress will make the kitties work a lot less so take care of the kitties!

Development

We started thinking about the game idea as soon as I saw the theme. One of the things that was a bit unfortunately was the fact that the last game jam were most of us worked on and did Ostrich Run has as a theme Stronger Together, very similar to this theme.

We thought about many ideas along the way, for example, a robot that could disarm and equip new arms with different items to a car joined to another car with a rope that you would take through the street.

But we finally decided for this idea of a “idle” city of cats on top of a tree that would need to find a way to escape from it because they got trapped.

For most of the jam, we only had that tree you can see above with a lot of wip things and some numbers changing but no real balance at all or some feedback of what was happening.

It was one of the most stressing things of the development of this game till saturday night, sunday morning. We never knew if the game was going to be fun till the last moment. Most of the art got integrated after saturday midnight and we didn’t have the game balanced enough until 11am of the Sunday. This was a really scary feeling but given the nature of the game we were trying and the short time we had, I guess we couldn’t have done it in a different way at all.

Luckly for us, everything turned out good at the end. We had to cut some features like special cats but at the end we got something not only playable but really well balanced for the short time we had.

3 things that could have been better

Even we liked the result of the game, I think that there are a few things that could have been better.

• Making a strategy game was a balance nightmare and till the very end we didn’t know if it was going to be even playable or not.
• I know most of the game jams are 48hs. But I really missed the last week game jam. I felt like it was a no crunch game jam and we could work a lot more.
• I think we couldn’t reinforce the theme as much as we wanted to. Probably would had been nice to be able to add more feedback about how joining the cats at work would improve or deteriorate their working results.

3 things that did work out

• Even the balance was a nightmare. I think that it was not just luck it turned out well but the experience of Martín and that turned out very well at the end for the small time we had. Also, I think that searching for a way to expose values in order to balance helped a lot.
• All the “world” we created I think it gave a nice value to the game. This tree were the four areas had a small object that strongly identified them I think it turned out very nice.
• Using kitties was a nice selling point to try out the game 😛

Where can I play it?

If you didn’t play it yet and want to try it I recommend you to download it at here at itch.io. If you want, you can also play it on a browser at Newgrounds but it may have some performance issues as it was a game jam game.