There’s something about the night air that really brings the light to life… literally! And you’d best believe these little kitties are eager to get their claws on them!
Pounce! is a fast-paced action multiplayer party game that seeks to put a twist on the familiar cat’s game of laser chase.
We aim to produce a short playable demo of this concept within the next few months ready for our university submission deadline at the start of May. This demo will introduce the players to the core mechanics of the game within a round and establish the intended mood and style.
Our core team members have been spending time on concept art alongside their chosen specialisms to fully define our direction before we get really stuck into production, so we’re very excited to fully bring our ideas to life soon!
The following posts below showcase our concepts and greyboxing progress as of this original post - feedback is much appreciated so we can help this project succeed the best it can!
(Third-party assets used for mechanic prototyping GIF above:
The Kitty Glade is an elegant, high-class cat cafe/tea room situated in a lavish greenhouse that serves as a natural feline sanctuary and a beautiful venue for special occasions.
Here are some WIPs of our greybox alongside our moodboard and some prop concepts
For our demo, we plan on having 2 variants of each character available to demonstrate the unique abilities of each one. For example, the axolotl light creature may have the ability to allow itself to become invisible for a few seconds, while the fish light creature can spawn bubbles to trap cats temporarily.
The movement blueprint for the cat as well as the lighting for the scene are very much still a WIP - the cat placeholder we’re using is currently substituted into the default Unreal third-person character BP and has had little changes besides some modifying of some movement parameters, so we’re working on researching how to implement better locomotion that suits the character better.
As for the lighting, things will hopefully become clearer once we define lamp placements since temporary light “safe zones” for the light creature players are a planned mechanic in the game, but there are definitely some areas that are still too dark that I need to touch up. Any feedback or thoughts are appreciated as always:)
Things are coming together smoothly for Pounce! The Kitty Glade concept art paints a purrfect haven for cats everywhere! Thank you for sharing your development progress with us in the forums! I’m excited to see more catastic updates.
Sharing progress on our cat model and rig on behalf of our character artist and rigger! Their comments are attached alongside
Cat Model
Base shape is done but now trying to figure out how to sculpt in the fur (it’s a bit messy on the front right now, still a work in progress), and to add a mouth cavity, would appreciate any feedback and suggestions.
Been working on the rig for our cute cat using the base mesh, in its current state the joints are placed and oriented, used a basic IK handle to see if the joints bend in the correct way. Would appreciate some feedback on this if possible.
Yesterday was our alpha progress submission for which I very quickly bashed our hero asset together with some rough textures :") Much work is to be done on it as I learn more about stylised foliage creation in Unreal and refine the sculpt and materials, but here is how it looks for now:
My current workflow for the foliage cards is to draw them myself in Photoshop and make the clusters in Maya before importing into Unreal, although for other foliage in the scene I will probably look into utilising SpeedTree as well. The leaves and flowers for the main cat tree ATM are based on those of the Dipteryx oleifera tree native to parts of South America - since our setting is a greenhouse I figured I’d keep the tropical theme consistent amongst all the plants
Been a while since I remembered to update here, but I’m happy to share our progress update video which we made for our beta deadline Rough pass of a trailer concept as well as tying together what we generally want for the scene. I’ll be working on some more refined and polished foliage to populate the scene (currently using Megascans placeholders) as well as modelling out some branches properly onto the main tree in SpeedTree, which I’ve started familiarising myself with recently.
Greetings again, @aumaiiee. I hope you and your team are doing well! You’ve all advanced so far in the development of “Pounce!” since I last posted in this thread, which is amazing! I have a question: What has been the biggest challenge for you and your team during this process so far?
Apologies for neglecting to make progress updates in this thread - more of our progress updates are available on our Polycount thread if anyone is interested in seeing them
In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce that we compiled a final trailer for our university submission deadline! Any and all feedback is appreciated as always so we can make this project the best it can be.
We’re actually still working to polish the project further, though, since we’ve been lucky enough to be shortlisted as candidates for our university’s end-of-year showcase So hopefully if we develop the project well enough we’ll be selected! We’re also hoping to enter the Rookies competition for this year.
Unfortunately, we had to cut a few corners on gameplay development in order to focus our attention on building the visual aspects of the game, but these too will be refined, so stay tuned for updates ^^
Hi @Zezkaii , thanks for checking in on our project! Sorry for the late reply, I’ve all but forgotten to check these forums the past couple months
From my perspective, I’d say the biggest challenge for all of us has been balancing work on this project alongside the other assignments we’ve had to manage on top of it (typical university student experience, haha). Time management as a skill is still something I’m very much learning as it’s very easy for me to get overly absorbed in one thing and neglect others :"D Working on a project like this in a small team also means we’ve all had to wear multiple hats during production every so often, despite our specialisms, which is a good skill to have but again has been difficult for me to manage.
On a more specific note regarding technical things, I suppose it would be getting to grips with shaders and materials for me! As the primary environment and foliage artist for our project, these are obviously important things to consider both for optimisation and creating strong visuals. I’d like to dabble more in tech art in the future to facilitate more efficient and appealing environment production, and with the time we’ve been given now to polish our project further for potential showcasing, I’m hoping to learn as much as possible to really bring the visuals of our level together
No worries! @aumaiiee, I know how time can fly when you’re busy, making time management a little bit harder when I think about it.
However, thank you for taking the time to break down the challenges you and your team faced! Through it all, Pounce has been evolving ever so elegantly and will continue to grow! Hopefully, you’ll share more updates as polishing continues for the end-of-year showcase.
I’m endeavouring to update at least my end of things here so I don’t forget again
The floor tiling texture from before was a very rushed one I created for the sake of our original deadline. I’ve since taken the time to polish a much better and tidier looking one which I’m much happier with!
Jump headfirst into a wild cat chase under the stars!
Core Team 
Thank you for sharing your development progress with us in the forums! I’m excited to see more catastic updates. 
So hopefully if we develop the project well enough we’ll be selected! We’re also hoping to enter the Rookies competition for this year.
