Nyan Heroes
Platform: PC (Epic)
Studio: 9 Lives Interactive
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Released: 2024 (series of 4 pre-alpha demos)
Nyan Heroes is a team-based hero shooter where cats pilot giant mechs in the fight to reclaim their world, Nekovia.
Involved just after inception as the game's Principal Technical Game Designer in April 2022, I am mainly responsible for:
-
Designing + building all game modes
-
Parts of the core gameplay (cats!)
-
Managing small team of designers.
-
Supporting other departments with implementation and optimisation.
-
Designing/Prototyping gameplay (systems).
-
Supporting other designers with Unreal/Blueprint logic.
-
Writing and implementing VO lines, and (placeholder) SFX/VFX
-
Ensuring designer blueprint logic was performant and didn't cause any performance issues.
-
Representing the design team with regards to workflow/source control
I worked closely with all disciplines, collaborating especially closely with the engineering team to create a usable 'game mode toolkit' to facilitate rapid prototyping, and support elements that weren't possible/viable in blueprints only.
Charity is also a focus for the project. So far a total of $350k was donated to cat rescue efforts.
Overview
Live Gameplay Footage
Nyan Heroes first went live on the Epic store in March 2024 for a 2 week test.
We have subsequently released 3 more demos, the most recent one just completed in April 2025.
Since the first playtest, Nyan Heroes has consistently featured in the Epic Games Store upcoming wishlisted top 10.
Highlights of the competitive eSports tournament in Demo 1 (2024)
EGS Wishlist top 10. Screenshot taken in May 2025
Compilation of streamer reactions to the first demo in 2024
Nyan Heroes does feature crypto elements, however the goal was always to appeal to regular 'web 2' gamers.
Here is a compilation showing some cool plays and reactions from regular streamers who seemed to get into the game.
Game Mechanics
Ejecting/Cat Gameplay/Remeching
At the start, only the mechs were playable and we started to wonder: "what if the cats could eject and were playable too?". I was asked to prototype the associated gameplay, to help answer this question. And so I designed and prototyped:
-
Cat gameplay (starting off using a scaled down Assasin pawn with a cat mesh)
-
Ejecting.
-
Auto-eject if the player's mech was destroyed, but also
-
manual eject, which is available on [Z] if their health is below a certain percentage.
-
-
Remeching. I created a guage that fills up over time. When full, the player can summon their mech with [Z], and continue the battle.
We wanted to strike a balance between encouraging the player to get involved with the battle, but not make it such that it was overpowered and annoying to enemies. On the other hand, we wanted to retain the player's feeling of vulnerability when playing as a cat (juxtaposed against the powerful mechs), yet give the cat escape and hiding potential.
A couple of systems I came up with addressed certain concerns:
1. Initially, we found that players tended to cower and hide after ejecting. To promote engagement, I implemented a system where doing damage also contributed to the re-mech guage filling up.
2. We also found that players were getting increasingly cautious as their guages were filling up, as being killed close to a re-mech was considered as unfair (essentially, experienced as additional respawn time). To alleviate this, I came up with a system whereby the player's respawn time was dynamic, and took the player's cat survival time into consideration.
Ejecting & re-meching sequence
3. Some players were missing the correlation between doing damage and the re-mech timer reducing. To help with this I proposed we added a flash to that UI element on doing damage, so the player starts associating these together.
And so I also ended up being responsible for the cat gameplay overall, including camera, controls, balancing stats/abilities etc. Later I was also involved with designing the mech riding.
I'm satisfied that I've succeeded in creating systems that result in the player surviving the battle as a cat and successfully remeching really gives a great sense of satisfaction. And ultimately I'm proud that these systems made the game really stand out in terms of giving it more identity and a bit of a USP.
Mech-riding gives invulnerability to the cat
Game Objects
I was responsible for building, or at least prototyping all of the game objects used in Nyan Heroes. This includes things like pickups, interactible environmental objects and game objectives.
Example of some cosmetic pickups I wired up in my test level
The Payload
The Fishball
Function I wrote to handle bounce SFX and VFX, where the frequency is limtited to prevent it from going mental
Game Modes
Overview
I am responsible for building all of the game modes in Nyan Heroes. The main modes we have live currently are:
-
Stronghold (Yucatán)
-
Payload (Antartica)
-
Fishball (Neko Tokyo)
Early Prototyping
Prior to this, I have been busy with a series of experimental modes, while we 'found our feet', as it were. When we initially started off, we were aiming for a Battle Royale game. Then that evolved into a 4 team-based affair, before we decided to go the objective-based route. Each step of the way I supported the game modes, and, created all associated game objects.
I also created (placeholder) UI, messages and implemented all the VOs, SFX and VFX.An example of an early prototype is this 4 team fish extraction effort.
WiP Prototype match from mid 2023. Dev playtest.
Although we felt this mode had potential, it was in its current form too complicated for what we wanted, and so suffered in terms of accessibility. There were 4 teams, and multiple factors contributing to the team scores, including kills and fish deliveries.
Therefore we decided to boil things back, reduce the team count to 2 and try out modes with more simple objectives.
Fishball
Switching up the tempo compared to the other modes, Fishball is an intense cat-themed e-sport situated in downtown Neko Tokyo. Each team must score goals using a pufferfish-shaped ball in the opposing goal.
First to 5 wins (or most scored when the timer is up).
Carrier debuffs applied using Unreal's Gameplay Ability System
Dev playtest of Fishball game mode. Recorded early 2025
I set the Fishball mode up to quickly test out various configurations. A-B testing, as it were. I exposed relevant variables to PlayFab profiles, and configured these to have different setups.
For example, here we can see that there are a couple of different carrier debuff settings. In the first the player cannot shoot, but can use their movement abilities, in the second the opposite is true (we went with the latter in the end!).
I wired up all the game objects such as the goals and ball in blueprints, and handled all the scoring in blueprints too, which allowed for quick prototyping/iteration.
What I particularly liked about the mode is the sudden death feature I came up with to resolve draws, which functions in both senses of the term; respawns are disabled, so either last team standing or next team to score wins - whichever comes first.
This ended up leading to some very close and tense situations!
GOALLLL!
Misc
NFT Generator
Back in 2022, when NFTs were still hot (ahem), I was asked to create a system that would generate 11098 unique guadian setups. The variables included 3 types of attachment, series of decals 'cattoos', and a series of raries and different materials for each. Each NFT included 3 images with different poses, and so my total output was 33294 unique high resolution images.
Using only blueprint logic, I sucessfully generated the images, which formed the NH Genesis release, and can still be seen on sites like Magic Eden.
I approached it by importing the pre-calculated guardian setups from Excel via a data table into a special Unreal map. The blueprint script then took the instructions from each line and configured a mech in a scene as specified in the datatable, and selected an appropriate camera based on shot and mech type.
Then it took a high resolution screenshot of each and saved it with a specific descriptive name that the blockchain crew used to do their magic, before moving onto the next one.
AI Skin designer
As part of an experiment in early 2023, I was asked to design and prototype an AI skin creator, as a bit of a concept/demo to show what could be done in the future if we allowed players to create and customise their own skins using AI generated textures.
I later created an updated version where I used Unreal's savegame feature to remember player's setups. In this video I'm skipping through some of my favourite creations.
"Got any catnip on ye?"
Tool now includes cat paws in UI and saved setups