[RELEASED] CAT Game Builder:The easier, faster way to make games in Unity

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CAT Game Builder: The easier, faster way to make games in Unity

Tricky Fast Studios is proud to announce CAT Game BuilderCAT Game Builder is the easier, faster way to make games in Unity. With CAT’s scores of modular Conditions, Actions, Triggers, and integrated game systems, you can create prototypes, demos, or full games with little or no additional programming.


The Idea
Over the years, we have found one need that is common across all our clients: a faster way to create content and new features. Unity provides an excellent framework for laying out the visuals of a game, but you still need to do a fair bit of programming before the game comes to life. While working with Story Arc Media on Poptropica Worlds recently, we found ourselves with exactly this problem. A ton of game features and content needed to be created for the initial launch and accelerated content generation was desired post-launch.

Building upon the ideas behind systems we had designed and developed on previous projects, Mike had devised a relatively simple, yet extremely powerful, state machine based toolset for content creation. Rather than trying to create a flowchart style state editor, we relied on the inherent editor UI in Unity. Virtually every system in the game interfaced with CAT. Meaning creating additional content, even new systems, could be done without any new code. We could update the game without triggering a new submission to the app stores. CAT was the toolset that allowed us to meet our deadline with relative ease. Making content was so fast!

Upon shipping Poptropica Worlds, we decided to create an even more robust version of CAT for the public (ok for ourselves too). Enter CAT Game Builder!


What is CAT Game Builder?
CAT Game Builder is a fully extendible framework designed for use by professional teams yet easy enough for beginners to master. Using a similar workflow and design to built-in Unity components, CAT Game Builder seamlessly extends the Unity editor to become a complete game making tool. Its power, ease of use, and versatility make CAT an excellent choice for individuals and teams of all sizes.

With CAT Game Builder, building custom Conditions, Actions, or Triggers to use and reuse in your own games is a breeze. Additionally, it is easy to integrate into both new and existing game systems with just a bit of programming, so you can make new games or add features to existing games easier and faster than ever before. Future add-on modules will provide CAT integrated systems to make it even easier to build many genres of games including RPG, RTS, FPS, Casual, MOBA, Casino games, and more.


What is in it?

  • Complete No Code solution for game development

  • Included examples and ready to use prefabs

  • Build and reuse modular components

  • Data bind directly to Unity UI components to create UI fast

  • Modular Player and Camera Controllers

  • Save and Restore Game State

  • Integrated and extensible Localization support

  • Interactive debugging - in editor and in game

  • Built and supported by game industry professionals

  • Production-ready and professional quality

  • Fully integrated with Unity’s workflow

  • Comprehensive manual and video tutorials

How Do I Get CAT Game Builder?
CAT Game Builder is available on the Unity Asset Store!

About Tricky Fast Studios
Tricky Fast Studios is a full-service video game production company specializing in building and scaling high-quality mobile, PC, and server-based games. We operate as both a turn-key development studio and as a trusted outsourcing partner providing top-tier engineering and creative talent to existing teams in North America and abroad.

For more information, contact us.

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How long will the discount offer run for?

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Most likely only a couple weeks.

We just updated the online manual, which you can find here.

Happy to answer any other questions!

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Ok, thanks, good to know. I plan to buy a copy at the end of next week.

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Great! We’ll also be releasing some tutorial videos shortly that should help get you started!

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Ok, great. That’s good to know. I’m hoping to use this as my main prototayping tool, I tend to prototaype game mechanics every weekend but even with a large array of scripts and prefabs I’ve put together it can still be an overlong process, so I’m hoping this asset can reduce the time it takes to test struff.

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We use it internally for prototyping all the time! The balancing example game that comes with CAT started off as just such a prototype. It’s really great for quickly seeing if something is fun, or if some game idea works. The great part is that if you have existing scripts, it should be pretty easy to integrate them, which can make them even more versatile! There’s a section towards the end of the manual with some examples of how to do that.

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Here’s a screenshot from the included side-scroller example:

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Hey all,

We have tutorials coming your way. Here is the latest, How to Make Pong!

Check out the video(s) and see how easy and fun it can be to use CAT: Game Builder!

Thank you and enjoy!

  • Jon
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Thinking about buying this asset for prototyping. I noticed in the intro video, there was reference to future support for VR development. Can you elaborate more on what tools you’ll be providing VR developers?

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We have some parts of this done already. This is mostly because we’ve prototyped a VR game or two with CAT. As for specifics-- definitely the obvious things like supporting input from various VR controllers. Support for various types of locomotion (teleport vs smooth moving) through our camera controller system. We will likely go a bit further into controls and add in some gesture recognition.

For all of the addons we have planned, we intend to include various related game systems. For VR, one of the big ones would be an interaction system for physically interacting with objects. These systems have Conditions, Actions, and Triggers integrated and this would be no different. This means you could use Actions to determine what a push button did when you push it with a controller, or use Conditions to determine if you can plug one object into another. Another system I’d like to see is a VR UI-- both one that works like a traditional 2D UI (except in VR), and one that is 3D with buttons you can push and such like Job Simulator or other games. These would both use the databinding system in CAT which is rather powerful and lets you connect your UI directly to the data it represents.

The VR addon is definitely one that I’m pretty excited about, so that will likely be one of the first we work on.

Hope that answers your question!

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Awesome! Sounds like good stuff. Is this the best forum to stay up to date on schedule for these add-ons?

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Yup! We will definitely be keeping this thread updated with any new information. We’re also in the process of setting up a mailing list. I’ll post that info here when it’s ready.

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We’re working on some new tutorial videos. What would everyone like to see? Any specific genres of games or areas you’d like covered?

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I haven’t had time to go into the manual or look over the current videos so please forgive me if I am asking for tutorials on things that are already there. A detailed video on how to incorporate other assets. I am currently setting up my prototyping environment which includes additional assets such as the Critias Foliage System and various other assets to speed up level prototyping, I read that the new manual has info on this but it is not very detailed. MIght it be possible to do a detailed example of creating a new service and possibly a new system? I am especially interested in placing inventory items in a scene, possibly in a specific area say on a model of a scale and moving them around in-game. CAT-os probably easily capable of this but giving a heads-up on how that task might be done using CAT might be useful to figure out just how the asset works. Well for me at least.

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I am interested in this but still not sure how this is better than what is out there already such as Gameflow, Bolt, Game Creator, Herokit, etc. BTW, are the add-ins going to cost extra?

Viewing the tutorial videos, even if I can’t follow along, is a good idea. It can give us an idea of how easily games can be created.

As far tutorials I’d be interested in simple ones to start with in order to give me an idea of how flexible CAT is (i.e. can create different genres of games.) Pacman, Galaxian, Infinite Runner, Card games?

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That’s a really good idea! I wrote a few blog posts that detail building some AI systems in Unity (without CAT), and I’d really like to do follow up tutorials which show how to integrate those systems into CAT. I think I’d look on a case by case basis whether it makes sense to do them as a video, a blog post, or both.

For level building assets like Critias Foliage System, there probably isn’t any integration needed unless there are run-time parameters you want to manage with CAT like wind direction if it supports it (I’m not too familiar with that asset). On the flip side, I’d like to release some free add-ons which provide CAT integration to other popular assets.

We plan to add a full fledged inventory system into the RPG add-on, but it should be fairly straight forward to build one in CAT today without additional code (except maybe to persist the inventory to disk). That does seem like a great topic for a video-- I’ll add that to the list! We have a simple RPG example that comes with CAT, but we did stop short of adding inventory to it. Here’s a screenshot from it with a bit of the player’s state machine showing:

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I was just glancing through the manual and noticed the list of example games (nice).

Okay, this may be a subjective question but taking the two most complicated sample games (side-scroller and RPG) how much time do you think using CAT would save you on development time compared to code alone? Obviously, you’d have no problems coding it from scratch so I am considering that neither is a hindrance (no learning curves.) Example, (just random numbers thrown out there,) 12 hours coding alone, 6 hours with CAT. I am a coder myself but being the sole developer I am always looking for ways to help me be more efficient and accomplish a lot in a short time (and my opinion, flow charts get more complicated than code and of the “visual programming” assets I own and have tried, Gameflow has helped development time the most.)

Thanks for taking the time to read my posts.

(Edit to add: the questions are directed towards you as the developer. Your team is obviously talented in Unity development and developed this to help you. I am just wondering how much time it has saved you in development. This will help me decide if the purchase and learning time will pay off.)

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What I think is the most obvious benefit is that we specifically avoided using nodes because they quickly become a mess when you start adding complexity. This is something I’ve seen with every node based editor I’ve worked with on professional teams. Most of the other visual scripting frameworks use node editors (Game Creator and Herokit are exceptions here).

CAT also uses higher level building blocks, so you aren’t just coding Unity’s low-level API. This reduces complexity and also makes it much faster to build or prototype. Our thinking here is if you’re already going to have to learn Unity’s programming API, what’s the benefit from doing that in a visual editor vs just also learning C# syntax?

Looking specifically at Game Creator and Herokit, they seem excellent, but they are also seem tailored to 3D character based games. CAT is flexible enough to be used on any genre of game, and you can can prototype or often build the whole game without code. Some of the no-code examples it comes with are: Flappy Bird clone (in 3D), an RPG (also 3D), a side-scroller (2D), pong clone (2D), brick breaker (2D), and a physics balancing game (3D). Beyond those, we’ve also used it to prototype an RTS game (3D), Solitaire (as seen in the video, 2D), an endless runner (2D), and quite a few others.

Finally, we’ve also designed it to be very easy to extend or integrate with other systems. I think sometimes this is one of the underappreciated benefits, especially for people or teams who do know how to program. If you’re building a game system like a spell system, inventory system, or special abilities attached to cards in a CCG, adding Conditions, Actions, or Triggers to the system both makes the system much quicker to build and also much more flexible.

It’ll be a mix. Ones that do cost extra will include enough functionality and content to justify the expense. Those ones will have enough art assets used in included examples to get you started building your own games of that genre. They’ll also have fully developed CAT integrated game systems which are similar in quality and flexibility to what you’d see in a AAA game.

I’m actually looking at starting an infinite runner series of videos this weekend, and we have a companion tutorial to our Flappy Penguin example in progress as well. Those others are also great ideas, too! Ideally, we’d like to build up a decent sized library of video and written tutorials.

Edit: Just saw your other post-- responding to that now!

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We generally see most of the time savings in a few areas with CAT assuming you are familiar with the framework and Unity:

  • Prototyping - While we were building this version of CAT, I kept trying to find game genres that you couldn’t implement with it, and I did this by prototyping games in those genres. This would often include adding a Condition, Action, or Trigger here or there, and I could prototype 1-2 games in a day. Pong took me about 20 minutes including writing 2-3 new CATs (not that it’s a shining example of complexity), and since I often demo CAT by building it, I can do it in about 5 minutes now. If I had to put numbers to it, I’d say in the worst case scenario, it’s 30% faster, but normally you’d see more like 50%.
  • Implementation - This is where you’d be building out real parts of the game. If you need systems that CAT provides like quests, persistence, localization, or camera/player controllers, it’ll save you 100% of the time of building those obviously. Building new game systems in code and integrating CAT can save 50% to 80% of the time. As an example, I wrote the first iteration of the CAT quest system in about a night, and it was already more functional than the quest system in a popular ARPG I worked on because it benefited from the pre-existing CATs. For example, I didn’t have to write extra functionality to complete a quest step if the player enters a trigger area. Just use the Proximity Trigger.
  • Iteration - CATs show up in the hierarchy view, and you can reorder them, copy/paste, and so on like any other Game Object. It also doesn’t trigger a recompile when you make those changes in the editor. This makes for a pretty big savings when you’re changing functionality around.
  • Content Creation - Once you have the game mechanics in place, this is an area where CAT really shines. It takes about 5 minutes to put together a new level for the side-scroller example in CAT because it’s all just using the excellent content creation tools in Unity. Even if you wanted to mix things up and add a moving platform-- well, I just tried that and it took about 2 and a half minutes.

Looking back to Poptropica Worlds, I’d say we built that game in about 1/2 the time it would have taken otherwise. Though keep in mind, that includes building their implementation of CAT from scratch.

Thanks! And that’s definitely how I read it. I might be just a little biased, but I’m confident it will pay off!

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