8/9 (Game Jam)

You play a stray cat crossing a city that was never built for you.

The constraint. A game jam: a fixed, short time limit and three of us. Whatever we shipped had to be understandable without a tutorial, because nobody reads instructions on a jam page.

My contribution. I worked on the concept and wrote the gameplay code in Unity, sharing design duties with the other two.

The design decision. The threat is not an enemy that chases you — it is scale. Cars and dogs are hazards because a cat is small in a world built for everything else, so the danger reads instantly from a single screenshot. Choosing a hazard the player understands on sight was what let us skip explaining anything.

What I took from it. Jams are the fastest feedback loop I have found. The time limit forces a design down to one clear idea, and you learn immediately whether that idea reads to a player without anyone standing next to them explaining it.