Solo dev, first submission, pretty much winging it.

Start with nothing:

Embracing the theme of "Start with nothing", you control a cat who is trying to protect his empty litter box from dogs trying to do their business in it. As the cat, you will have to defend off waves of dogs, using temporary buffs that expire at the end of the round. Each turn you start with nothing, and you have to cleverly use each buff to defeat all the waves.

How to play

WASD or Arrows to move.

Left Ctrl or Left mouse button to swipe.

Left click on abilities to get their buff for 1 ROUND only. Next round you start with nothing

Win by stopping all the dogs from pooping in your litter box!

Survive 10 waves to go to the next level.

Abilities

Abilities can stack, but are lost at the new round.

Claws - Your attacks hit 3 times.

Fishy - You attack twice as fast.

Bone - Your attacks disable the dog for 1 second.

Water - Your attacks slow the movement of the dog.

Collar - Your cat now can push dogs around and block their movement.

There are 10 levels of 10 waves of "randomly" generated levels with constraints.

Some details about the project:

I produced all code and game assets you see. Since this is my first submission, I skipped the compo, but I pretty much stuck to those rules. The only art asset that was made previously was my main cat character. I am a software developer by day, but I went art heavy this time as I couldn't think of a good idea for the theme and thought I could brute force good ratings with cute cats and pretty graphics.

Tools used:

Unity for the Game engine.

Oculus Medium for sculpting.

Blender for model prep.

Substance Painter for texturing.

Instant Mesh for fast retopology.

Visual Studio 2019 for coding.

Final thoughts:

All in all, I'm happy with how this turned out. I'm not happy with the game mechanics at all, and the idea of "losing everything" at the start of each turn is actually a terrible game mechanic, also you rarely want to use your powerups.

But apart from that, it was a lot of fun and I appreciate the opportunity to participate.

I was doing updates but couldn't figure out how to post them without completing my game, so I left them in now.

First update:

The first set of assets done:

I still need to animate some of them, and some of them are starting to scare me a bit, but so far this is good enough to work with. Some feedback on my acquaintances who love it:

Person one: "First one looks cool!"

Person two: "Electric, and I can’t stress this enough, chair"

Person three: "OK I'm not sure if this is going right 😅"

I've started on world generation.

I just need to hook this up to pathfinding and then I should be good to start on the enemy AI. The floor is possibly too bright, and the character is getting lost in it, but I will desaturate it later.

Update 2:

Other art assets are complete! They are really starting to come together. They all start to show faults if you look closely at them.. so please don't...

My cat is finally fully kitted out!

This guy slaps your dogs' ass, what do you do.