Pray, prey! is the result of the course ‘game projects’ at dae. During this course, we made a game demo with a team of 4-6 people in the theme of a couch party game. My team and I decided to go with a cat and mouse themed game, where one player can play as a hawk and up to two other players can play as mice. The goal for the mice is to get to the end of the level, while getting enough score to open the passage to safety at the end. But the hawk is hungry, so it’s goal is to catch and kill the mice! The mice can shoot and kill the hawk, but the hawk will always keep coming back. Once a mouse is death, it stays dead!

Trailer

Check out the trailer for the project here!

About the project

This game was created by a team of 6 people, 3 people form the Game Development major and 3 people form the Game Graphics Production major, for the course ‘Game Projects’ at DAE. The goal of this course was to get familiar with the whole process that goes in making a game from concept to the final product. We had to start by brainstorming to come up with a concept for our couch party game. Once our idea was approved, we had to start prototyping it, proving that our game would actually be fun to play. This process included making an art guide, outlining the intended art style and the document that would be used if a new artist would join the team. On the development side, we had to create a technical document that outlined all the programs we were going to use for this game, naming conventions, and gameplay descriptions. This document would also be used if a new programmer had to join the team. This turned out to be very useful as there was indeed a 3rd developer that joined the team about 4 weeks in!

Once the prototype was complete and approved, the real work started. We scrapped all the code and props we made in the prototyping part and started making the final game.

Pray, prey! was created with the Unreal Engine 4 using the Blueprint visual scripting system, over the course of a whole semester.

My involvement

I was involved in almost every aspect of the project, from initial ideas to prototyping to communication between artists and programmers and making sure stuff got done. I took on a manager role throughout the project. On the development side, I was mainly responsible for the hawk as a character. I had to make sure it was easy to play the hawk, as we really wanted it to be a threat to the mice. This ended up being a lot harder than expected. From the start of the prototyping of the game to the day we had to do our final presentation, I was constantly tweaking and changing the way the Hawk was controlled, to get it to a playable state. Other than the Hawk I was partly responsible for making the menus - player select menu specifically - and some of the interactive props found throughout the whole level. I was also the one merging the perforce dev branch to the main branch once a week and writing the development blog on itch.io, fixing bugs and making sure all aspects of the game interacted as desired.

Download

The game is available for download on the Official itch.io page .

Meet the team