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DESCRIPTION

Katamari Damacy is an action-adventure game by Bandai Namco, originally released in 2004 and remastered in 2018 with REROLL.  For my game cover of this, I broke down the core mechanics and subsequently recreated them in Unity. 

MECHANICS RECREATED

  • katamari ball movement

  • object collection

  • win/loss states

  • mass increase

ROLE

Solo Project | Systems Design Breakdown

YEAR

2021

DURATION

1 Week

TOOLS USED

Unity, C#

Project Overview

KATAMARI DAMACY

Anchor 1

SYSTEMS DESIGN

Breaking it Down Into the Basics

When looking at Katamari Damacy, I had to think about what made it what it is, and on a macro scale it is essentially rolling up everything on-site to become large enough to appease our god father.  But analyzing how we get to that point, I focused on the smaller mechanics that create that core gameplay loop.

The main takeaway from this systems breakdown was to analyze what made a simple gameplay loop of collecting items to meet a quota enjoyable, which I was able to do after looking into the original game and recreating its base mechanics, noticing the little details in the systems design that help polish the experience.

EXPERIENCE AND TAKEWAYS

Katamari Damacy Systems Recreation Demo

Example Gameplay of Sizing Up Depending on Mass at Different Set Increments

Looking into Katamari Damacy Reroll and playing through it, I was able to gather insights as to the base mechanics of Katamari, such as movement controls, the gameplay loop when collecting objects and their conditions - such as being unable to collect items bigger than one's current Katamari ball size, and more.

I mainly chose to focus on the mechanics of how the ball moved, collected items and sized up or down accordingly, taking note as to the gameplay conditions made the gameplay experience more enjoyable.

Getting the katamari ball movement and object collection was relatively easy; In order to create the effect of drag, I had used AddForce in the katamari ball’s movement script and to recreate being able to only pick up certain objects at different masses, I added in a mass parameter to check if a player could pick up an item depending on their mass.

 

Concerning the growth of the ball, I had run into the issue of objects being picked up going inside the ball mesh rather than adding on, so as a solution workaround, I had increase the mesh colliders on the ball and the player controller.

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