The great cat distractions

a small two month side project involving cats and rpg's

I know, I know. I have been missing. My words are gone, and you’re all probably wondering, oh noes! Where did the fox go? Is Monster Heart still a thing? And, yes, yes, it is still a thing…

The art on Monster Heart was very time consuming but awesome, and the other bits of content like story, characters, even time, scheduling, etc, where getting to be so thorny it made my head spin. I had to take a small break, make another super simpl game, like what I did with Bad Writer. I figured it would be more complicated than Bad Writer, but since I could use the engine I created for Monster Heart (and just add new elements to it), it could feasibly done in a month or two. Well, looking more like two to two and a half now, but that’s okay!

Anyway, what is the game? Well, it’s a cat rpg. That’s it, that’s the whole idea. I always wanted to do a classic RPG, much like Ultima:Exodus on the NES, or the NES Dragon Warrior (Quest) or Final Fantasy games, or the first few Phantasy Stars. These were before RPG’s on consoles started delving deep into story, and where more about simplified pure RPG experiences. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a writer. I love the story driven RPG’s a ton, and some of them are my favorite games of all time!

But my first introduction to these games where on the Nintendo, and I fell in love with that play style, and I always wanted to create a game like that. Simplified, stripped down, not a lot of different doodads and skills and things added to combat, not a lot of branching narrative paths, just the pure RPG experience. I figured, if I stripped it down to the bare timbers like that I could easily get the game hammered out in a few months, maybe more.

But I never got an hook for it. I mean, there are tons of 8bit style RPG’s these days, and some of them are my favorites. I love the embrace of old school pixel art, the stripped down game mechanics, the blip bloop sound effects, all of it. But I felt like I couldn’t just do what they’re all doing. I needed an angle to make it interesting to me.

And then I thought about how much everyone loved the cat (and all the cat puns) in Bad Writer, and I knew what I had to do. So once I got bogged down all head spinny in Monster Heart, I figured I could take a few months off and work on this little side project. It’s coming along nicely, and I’m knee deep in the code right now. There is still a lot I have to do, but I still think I can get it out mid-September, though it might be at the start of October, depending. It’s probably going to be on the Nintendo Switch, on Itch.io, on Steam, and iOS.

It’s going to have randomly generated worlds, towns and cities, so each play through will be unique. I always thought of how much fun Final Fantasy 1 was, or Dragon Quest, etc, and how interesting it would be if there was a world generator for it, so you could go on tons of little small quests over and over again with different characters, etc. So, in that way it’s rogue-ish. But like other Rogue likes, it’s not a twin stick shooter or action RPG. It’s pure turn based goodness, boiled down to a simple gameplay that’s fun and addictive. There is permadeath of a sort, but you’re a cat so you have nine lives, so it’s not that big of a deal.

Each world has a few dungeons and a few cities, with one dungeon being the “end boss dungeon”. That dungeon is locked, and the key to unlock it is a different random dungeon. And in a different random dungeon will be the magic weapon that can kill the final boss. I figure this will give it the feel of the older games, with NPC’s in each town seeded with hints on where the items are, and which dungeon is the boss dungeon. Like I said before, it’s stripped down gameplay. And it auto saves, so if you’re playing on the go, you won’t have to worry about running to the latest save point or losing everything.

I even tried to sort of emulate the NES look and feel of the game. It ended up being sort of 16bit, but not quite. It is a limited color pal still, but one based on old water colors from illustrated manuscripts. So it oozes with a nostalgia, and the colors aren’t bright and cheery like the SNES, but more desaturated and dreary, like the Gameboy Color or the NES. The game is strictly 16x16 tiles and characters, also giving it that old school look and feel. It does have a complex in game lighting, but I liked the way it looked, and really I’m going for more of a classic console RPG feel, and less of a strict guideline.

Anyway, I’ll keep you all updated here on the progess. It’s going to be a fun, simple game. A pure bare bones RPG experience. And there is some joy to that. Oh, and it will have lots of cat jokes. Meow.