I welcome you again to our cozy little cattitude DevLog. Sit back and relax while we tell you about all the changes our game went through this week. It was the last one before the feature freeze, means we take the game in the state it is in now into polish. 

Another Interactable

"..:Another one?" you might ask. During our last meeting I got the Idea for the following Puzzle and even tho the feature freeze was close I really wanted to implement it. The object we are talking about is a smart fridge that might not be as smart afterall. If two cats work together they can activate the icecube disposer and icecubes will drop on the kitchen floor until the human turns it back off.  The more time passes, the more points the cats get, so it definetely is top priority to fix it.

Human Pick Ups

Something that changed very drastically this week are the human pickups. We were not really happy with the Design of it, they were kinda boring and programming wise they didn´t work as well either. So we did some brainstorming and reflared them. Both of the items still do the same in the core, but the execution differs heavily.

1. The Roomba

Before the human could pick up a spinach can which gave him the power to spawn a circle and clean everything in the radius with one click. We saw two issues in this item: The Spinach was absolutely not visible from the camera standpoint so it kinda took the joke and reasoning for the boost away. Also was it hard to actually make use of the item. Reaching more than two items at once was often barely possible. SO, we changed from spinach to a Roomba! The human can now pick it up, and the Roomba will drive around him circles. Instead of picking up Items in the Radius ONCE, it will now keep picking up things for as long as the Item is active.

2. Breakdance

Remember the wool that sucked in the cats? Well, it didnt really look as great and it gave a lot of issues. We came up with a way more creative way of stunning the cats and gaining some points as the human. Some of you might know, that the main character of our game is based on an actual person. And that person... Used to be pretty invested in breakdancing. So instead of picking up wool, you can now turn on the jukebox and breakdance for how long you want by keeping the button pressed. (With a limit of course). Cats who are around to see it will be mesmerized and lose points.

The big catch

Another thing that did not really want to work out was the catch mechanic. Up to last week it was possible to catch a cat, but as soon as that happened the characters got stuck in animations they were not supposed to be in. Letting the cat down again did not work properly and mashing the button did not work out either. I already put this mechanic on a list of "probably will be kicked out" but I had some time left in the end I thought I give it another shot. And now it works! 

More Indications

We already added some Indications last week, but this week we added even more. I replaced the billboards we had so far with material billboard to make them stick out better. We added indications for the plunger, for when your controls are inverted and for when certain buttons have to be pressed or hold. 

Character Selection Logic

Well, this was a really hard nut to crack. Glenn already spent quite some time on it last week and due to the difficulty of it we decided to get together for it this week. Working in this really was exhausting and took us longer than I like to admit. When we solved one issue we were standing in front of the next one. Getting the right controller Ids that interact with the UI and assigning everything back depending on the selection was really hard but it works now! This really was one of the moments where I wished we had a programmer on our team. But I am really proud that we got it to work eventually! You will probably see visuals of the selection screen in Glenns part of the devlog.

Bugs, Bugs and more Bugs

Does anyone have an anti-bug-spray? I could have really needed that this week. A lot of my time went into fixing bugs here and there, refining some parts that did not fully work like intended yet and getting the game ready for the feature freeze. I have not much to show you to that but you will definetely feel it when playing the game!

- Written by Sarah -

The last week of the second production sprint is over and a lot has happened, both big and small changes happened but all working towards the same goal, Making this the best game we can!

This week I mainly improved on stuff that was already in the game, helped with bug fixing and testing but most of my time went to designing elements for the game, then redesigning that design and then redesigning the redesign. You get the drift.

Pop pop pop-up

First of we needed some pop-ups for just that little extra player feedback. We needed one for the plunger to communicate to the human player that, to fix the toilet, they should pick up the plunger.

Next a music note. We changed our initial spinach power up to the boombox and needed to indicate to the player when they could get the power up from it. (Dear musicians did we get this note right? Let us know by leaving a comment and a 5 star rating)

Third we noticed that it was unclear for the human character to know when their controls got inverted because a cat activated the keyboard. So we made a, trademarked company name ,reverse card inspired pop-up to clear things up.

And last but not least the cat stun indication, I don’t really want to spoil how this one works but I’ll say this the cats and you both will be amazed.

UI

Last week we showed you the pause menu and how it worked, this week we managed to make the human playable with a controller and this showed us that the pause menu did not yet work for them. So I took some time this week to rewire some nodes et voila. A working pause menu!

The end

And by the end I mean the end of the round in our game. In previous versions we had a placeholder that would tell us who won, which admittedly isn’t very exciting. In this new version you get exactly the same thing BUT the text is bigger and shinier, you or your team get a place right at the front of the level if you win And you even get a totally digital trophy! By next week we’ll fill up the environment more, so you’ll really feel like a champion!

Character selection

The big one and most stressful one at that. If you read our previous devlogs you will know that the character selection screen had given us some real hard times before. But four eyes are better than two, and with some heavy lifting from Sarah we finally managed to get it working! Team work really is great.

With a working character selection, it was time to kick out all the placeholder images and replace it with new ones. As you can see in the gif below players can choose to be a cat or a human. And when they want to be a cat they are able to choose from a variety of skins too really stand out.

selecting the human

selecting the black cat

selecting the orange cat

That was it for me this week. Hope to see you back next week for polish week.

-Written by Glenn-

With the feature freeze being right around the corner the main focus will be improving what is already implemented

and getting everything right down to a T.

Currently, we are working on different skins for the cat to give some variety to the cats.

Aside from the cats and project, you might have noticed some changed to the Itch.io page!

The previous layout felt a bit washed out and didn't fit the overall feel of the game.

So, I've updated the banner, background and changed the title to fit the current layout.

We hope you also enjoy this change although it's separate from the game.