Mary A. Watkins
Interactive Multimedia
Analysis

"Cats" Game Analysis
The cute Flash game, "Cats", created by Ferry Halim can be found on his website www.orsinal.com. After the title screen, the instructions come up. "Touch the cats with your mouse to make them sit or walk. All cats have to follow the action of the leader cat. (The leader is the highlighted one) If the leader sits, you have to make the other cats sit. If the leader walks, make the other cats walk." Simple enough. Let's give it a shot.

Though the instructions are simple, it took me a minute at the start of the game to fully grasp what I needed to do to score in the game. Halim makes it interesting by changing the lead cat every so often. This keeps the game from getting stale. I was constantly on my toes waiting to see which cat was going to be the lead next. Once I knew what I was doing, watching the score increase rapidly made the game even more exciting.

The game begins with six rows of cats, some face left and some face right. As they move across the screen and disappear at the end of the "board", they reappear at the other side of the screen. This continues until the timer, in the upper left hand corner, runs out. However, as your score increases, so does the time. As the game goes on, more instances of cats appeared, making the game even more challenging. It gets to the point where you cannot keep up with the cats because they appear to be moving a little faster and there is more cats to work with.

During the game, the cats randomly walk or sit. This is probably accomplished through randomization, similar to the code for the invaders in the invaders game. In fact, there is quite a bit of randomization in this game. At each start, the cats are randomly facing different directions. There is also randomization in picking the leader through out the game.

To make one sit or walk, the player just needs to place the mouse over the cat. The trouble though is when you get to close to another cat, it will react to the mouseover as well. This is probably written much like the proximity code from Lab 4. Their animation is probably done using the timeline feature.

Overall, this is a pretty cool game. Not sure if I would be able to duplicate everything, but it does not seem too complex.