Virtual Paws, Real Adventure!

Game Overview

Rat Hunt Boogie is an immersive VR cat game where players can experience the life as a cat, whether it is by hunting rats, pushing plates from the kitchen table onto the floor or simply laying in couch watching the cat TV. Built with Unity and Meta XR SDK, this single-player game gives the player a unique experience of the life of a cat.

Gameplay Mechanics

Players utilize hand gestures to interact with the objects in the game environment:

• Walking: Players can walk by reproducing the hands motion that we defined. The motion looks like a cat walking.
• Jumping: Players can jump by putting their two hands close and tap on the ground (table in real life) with both hands.
• Grabbing: Players can grab rats, by doing a grabbing gesture (opened hand to closed hand). They can also grab different objects of the environment such as the TV remote control, knife, etc.
• Eating Rats: Players can eat rats after grabbing them. For that, they have to move the rat to their mouth.
• Interactions With Rats: After eating the rats, players can try to do different things with them. For instance, they can cook them in the microwave, or they can store them in the fridge.
• Interactions With The Environment: Players can interact with different object in the scene. For example there’s a TV that can be opened with its remote control, then, some cat videos will appear, the player can change channel using the remote control. The player also has a watch on its left hand displaying some information, the player can also tap on the watch screen with its right hand and some boogie music will play :).

Graphics & Interactions Technologies

• Meta Quest 3: Our first game (BlackHole Boogie) was also in VR with hand-tracking. We really liked this technology and wanted to pursue in this path, while still exploring and learning new things, especially on the graphics side, but also on the interaction side since the gameplay is very different.

In fact, a lot of work has been put into the interactions to try to make the player truly walk like a cat, we exploring different ways of hands movements to simulate walking like a cat. There were also a lot of interactions work that went into making the environment interactive, for example being able to grab objects and using them (tapping buttons…). We also put a lot of importance into the audio aspect of the game, adding a lot of sound effects for different interactions and making them 3D sounds. On the graphics side, we worked we things such as water, grass, fur, lighting, reflections, etc. to make the environment more real.

• Unity: We used this game engine for the first game and it worked really well, we chose to keep this game engine.
• Blender: Blender was quite useful for trying and making animations for the cat paw and rats. We also used it to try to add some fur effect to the cat paws.
• Git/GitHub: Version control and useful for code reviews.
• Notion: Useful for team management, assigning different tasks.