EPITA projects: CatCatch

This project was my first long project, at EPITA or otherwise, IT-related or otherwise. It was about making a game, how exciting!

About the project

The project happens during the second semester of the first year at EPITA. The subject is very free, with only a few constraints: it has to be in C# or OCaml. We were allowed to use a game engine, Unity3D. It lasts about 5 months, with a few intermediary steps:

• a project specification has to be submitted at the beginning of the project;
• two intermediary defenses, where we had to submit the current state of our project and a report of said state;
• a final defense, with a demonstration of the project.

As this is a long project, and there are no specific requirements, we were widely advised to make a game using Unity.

I forgot to mention, we were a team of four.

Our idea

Our very original idea was to make a game where the player would be a cat, trying to catch other cats, or avoid being caught. We named it CatCatch.

The cats trying to catch other cats would be modeled after our teachers, and the cats avoiding being caught after the students. The map where the game would take place would be our school campus.

So that’s what we did! The multiplayer version of the game was what you would expect, the solo version was against some bots.

You can read all about it in the specification and reports we had to submit¹.

The result

We ended up with a game without a huge map, okay graphics, and a hell of a lot of fun, probably because we made it though. The game was just working, on Windows, OS X (at the time), Linux and we even exported a WebGL version that we put on our website! Of course, we made some goodies, such as a 3D printed cat, a lighter, a customized CD installer and a printed user manual.

All the executables are still available², however the multiplayer mode won’t work.

Experience gained

Git

You would think that a project by four people is pretty easy to manage using git, and you would be right! If only, those four people weren’t first year students and didn’t have to deal with Unity garbage files and meta files impossible to read and merge manually. As I was the most experienced group member with git (I knew how to create a GitHub repository), I was put in charge of managing that aspect of the project. It taught me a lot about branches, using pull/merge requests as part of my workflow, and some other stuff I had to do to repair my teammates’ broken repositories. We also had to migrate to GitLab mid-project because of size limitations of GitHub.

Adaptability

A long project is bound to have some of its requirements change during development. A team member leaves the school, a new team member joins, some aspect of the game has to change, …, all of those we had to adapt to. It wasn’t always easy, but we didn’t have a choice. It taught me to be flexible in the way I work, and be open to change.

In retrospect

This project was a great introduction to collaboration with other people. I think it was a great way to start with something fun!

The source of this project is available here, such as the source for the submitted reports and the source of the website.