Catalyst

Quentin Zehnacker : Game Design

Noé Lyon : Game Art, Game Programming, Technical Art

Catalyst is more of a toy rather than a game. You don’t have any goal and you just want to cruise around in a mysterious and numerical world. The game was realised in the context of our semestrial project.

We had to use a systemic game design method. We chose to create a tension between the tendency of the player to gain speed while the game tends to slow down the player by randomly generating obstacles on his way. To gain speed you have to get as close as possible to the objects of the world and be aligned with them.

The twist here is the mechanic that we called “Posture Speed”. Our world is mainly made of cubes and depending on the distance between the ship and these cubes and how he is parallel with it, the player will fill a gauge of speed. When the gauge is full, the player will attain a new level of speed. Therefore, we got a tension within the other one, your tendency to gain speed can only be fulfilled by getting close of the obstacles putting the player in a constant critical state.

To offer more control to the player, we added a mechanic of “Drift”. In this state, time is slowed down and you can only control your orientation, it allows the player to breathe and analyse the environment to choose a new direction.