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pawborough · 5 months

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This month marks the one year anniversary of our successful Kickstarter.

The time has come, a very large and exciting update…

Let's not waste time.

The new Cat Creator update is LIVE!

And on top of that, it's coupled with our first ever live BREEDING PREDICTOR!

Currently, we only feature the three starter breeds. Over the next few months leading up to beta release, we will be adding new content to this demonstration, with Longhairs and Moontails coming first.

Few things of note!

We chose to keep the frontend UI of this demonstration page very limited so as not to distract our small coding team from the important development tasks. While we wanted to deck it out with bells and whistles, keeping it simple meant less time spent slowing down production of the more important bells and whistles that will be present at beta.

Pages like the TOS and lore will make a return in the near future! With everything overhauled, we wanted to “start fresh” with rolling things out.

We also chose to keep the mobile UI temporarily simple for the sake of prioritizing time and resources. Building out the more optimized mobile setup is on our development map.

Night mode will return! We’re currently finalizing the theme colors.

But we’re very excited to show you what we have so far. A lot of nitty gritty technicals went into this base functionality.

From there, the biggest behemoth we faced was our commitment to better quality assets.

The original demonstration was a prototype. One where we experimented, learned the ins and outs of the project, and used our resources to pitch the concept of an indie build-your-own-cat RPG experience. Early on, we received quite a bit of criticism on the visual development.

Once we had wind in our sails, we resolved to take that criticism seriously and come out the gate stronger, more professional, and far more confident than our concept pitch. The team committed to making something out of this world. We love this project, and wanted to put our all into it.

Our patterns now sport a painterly style, which better aligns to the original vision that we were trying to achieve with our first iteration.

After taking over as lead of the project, I learned and improved at giving artistic direction, and we as a team set out to unify the style. I could not be happier with the stunning work the cat artists have produced. What we now have is strong, unique, and cohesive.

It's all thanks to the masterfully skilled artists who worked hard to present what we are delivering today.

I want to shout out every artist who has worked on the assets seen in this demonstration. Without these people, we would not be here.

Thank you to:

Amelia (@ Pixus.art on Instagram)

Hydde (@ Nettlenest on Twitter)

Fulemy (@ Fulemy on Instagram)

Tybaxel (@ Tybaxel on Twitter)

Irene (https://irenehuang.com/)

Remmie (@ Hybridremmie on Instagram)

Emma (@ Missbluefrost on Instagram)

Eli (@ Nightly.art on Instagram)

and Asp! (@ Aspidal on Furaffinity)

For working on the cats!

Thank you to

Jerso (@ YerLAKAR on Twitter) for work on the current header!

And a big hand to our developers!

Wade

Sam

Harvey

Eric

And Jess!

All from CKCollab!

What's new in the Cat Creator?

Now let’s go over every change you will. Some of these new aspects will be an adjustment. To help keep clear communication, we want to lay out our thought process behind each choice.

1. The Color Wheel

The benefit of a limited color wheel is care and attention to aesthetic fine-tuning. Having every color predetermined for a cat means that there is no unfavorable color-blending between two parents. With preselection, we get more aesthetic appeal. However, historically this system has been limited for two reasons.

We have gone over this previously, so this is a quick summary:

Randomly generated cats with no prior breeding history end up unfavorably mismatched more often than not.

Breeding with so many color selections needs an alternative accommodating system for such a large catalog.

It was for these reasons that we previously wished to keep the wheel small. However, this was at the cost of a great deal of color diversity and representation. As a game about design, we returned to the drawing board to solve these problems rather than just working around them.

To refresh and summarize our solutions:

Generation 1 cats will generate from a selection of color pools, with totally random RNG being one of the pools so as not to lock out combinations. Example: a “gothic” pool of saturated reds and monochrome colors. We plan to have many of these so new cats still sport many different outcomes. And Shufflestones will still organically scramble colors!

We updated our breeding to focus around hue, saturation, and luminosity (also known as “lightness.”) Depending on the categories of the two colors you mix, your outcome will be picked from the same categories.

With these solutions in place, we could think more freely about user demand for color variety and utility. We expanded to a final total of 234 colors.

There are, and this is not an exaggeration, nearly 10,000 hand picked hex codes available in this demonstration; including both pattern colors and custom shadow colors. This was no small feat! It's work that pays off, as these colors can be consistently repurposed for new patterns, which we are mighty proud of. The color wheel was a long term labor of love that we poured our hearts into, discussing every aspect of cohesive design, color theory, namesake inspiration, variety, user demand, and wider aesthetic appeal. We feel that the work paid off!

2. Undercoats

We started with an Overcoat/Undercoat/Accent system which gave equal patterning opportunity to each section of the cat. While this allowed for some pleasing combinations when strategically applied, Undercoat patterns were frequently busy with very little leeway for tasteful design. It was a setup which, while neat in concept, was doomed to fail from the get go. Putting a flat illustration with curves with the body directly over a technicolor pattern was simply a challenging system to make visually work. We dummy illustrated quite a few undercoat patterns and were hitting a wall while making transitions. With a system which expects us to always be adding new patterns, we didn’t feel we could sustain this.

So we revisited the design. We removed undercoat patterns, but added two accents to allow for equally large customization opportunities. This helped to concentrate customization, letting us confidently hone in on and focus on large and small accents for more variety in options.

As previously discussed, one of our goals was to make sure colors worked together with different patterns. With our original system, we had frequent anxiety and strenuous workshopping with patterns like tiger, where darker or same-color undercoats would absolutely decimate the visual. As well, lowering the value of "double-color" cats.

We wanted to keep the beauty of more detailed cat markings, but it felt impossible with the color restrictions. It felt punishing to have so many incongruent combinations to the intention of the design.

A definite improvement!

This is our most radical change, and one we know will take the most adjustment. It comes with pros and cons, but the decision saved many patterns from looking unsalvageable over half of the time due to the nature of designing pattern transitions.

There are and will be overcoat patterns which do not alter the undercoat, and we intend to experiment further with how to best utilize this mechanic.

In general, we try to take risks when they’re necessary for the betterment of visual cohesion and meeting the appropriate expectations for a pattern. We hope you all can understand and accept this change!

3. Line-breaking Accents

We also are introducing consistent line-breaking accents. We’ve made the decision to distinguish line-breaking accents with accessories by distincting worn items with biological modifications.

In short, if something is separate from a cat’s body and can be worn, it’s an accessory. If something is part of a cat’s body, like fur, fins, or claws, it’s an accent.

Overgrowth was created before this distinguishing, so it is an outlier. But this is the rule we will follow going forward!

Line-breaking accents will be available to toggle the layering of in your cat’s outfit editor!

* Note: currently Overgrowths generating together clips and we intend to fix/limit this in the future.

4. White Coverage

White coverage is functional and ready for testing! This is our first live rendition of the real thing, so we’re open to feedback. We changed the “percentage” UX to something much simpler. We feel this is all around a better, more intuitive system.

One thing of note is that Calico as it has been known is not here, intended to be replaced with white coverage and bi-color patterns. We received early feedback that this was potentially frustrating, and are noting that going forward.

Another thing of note is that we are actively working on redundancies and ones which look poorly together. If you see an awkward shape with broken seams, we are probably going to fix it!

Overall, it’s a very cool mechanic!

5. Missing Patterns

Not all the patterns or genes from the old demo are here. Don’t panic!

While simple patterns like Cheeks and Lollipop are coming back soon (we just have to space out our work), patterns such as Cloudy/Day are on the backburner for now.

We want to re-illustrate this concept, but tackling it in our new style is a challenge best left for when we can better spread out our time and resources. Right now, artists are busy busy busy with everything necessary for beta and launch, and these challenging patterns take up precious time and resources best used to get the game in a playable state.

We apologize! It wasn’t easy making this decision, and this pattern is not gone forever. We simply opted for a smaller number of complex illustrations at this beginning stage.

6. New Eye Format

Eyes have now been split between Borough, Eye Type, and Eye palette! This allows you to change physical characteristics while customizing colors! For example, you can now create duo clouded eyes!

To summarize the major changes:

The color wheel was massively beefed out

Undercoats no longer have selectable patterning

Undercoat colors dynamically adjust to the overcoat pattern

There are two accent slots instead of one

Accents can now be significantly line-breaking, and will be inter-layerable with accessories

White coverage is functional

Patterns are missing. Some are coming back very soon, others are shelved to come back at a later date

New eye system allows for more customization

Wahoo! A lot of changes, some more drastic than others, but hopefully all around a competent design experience! Everything we have here is far more strongly in-line with our vision. We sincerely hope you enjoy!

P.S If you see any colors that look broken: let us know!

So how does breeding work?

This is the 1.0 version of our new breeding system. Most notably, things like rarities can and may be tweaked.

We encourage you to try it out for yourself!

Simply design two cats at the top, then click the “view offspring” button to load the cats into the breeding predictor. From there, you can view their color ranges and randomized outcomes. You will have to click this button again if you change the two cats.

Luminosity is determined by if the sun is clear (light), half full (medium), or filled in (dark). Colors with a paint drop are saturated, and colors without one are desaturated.

Is red, light, and saturated.

By mixing these three categories, you will receive differing outcomes dependent on adding the categories together. Think of it like so:

What hue is each color? The color selection will be picked via available hues. If both colors are the same hue, your results will only include that hue. If the colors are two different hues, you will get multiple results depending on the two. Refer to this chart to help make sense of the combinations:

Are both colors saturated, desaturated, or both? If one color is saturated and one is desaturated, all your results will be both saturated and desaturated. If both colors are saturated, all your results will be saturated. If both colors are desaturated, all your results will be desaturated.

Are both colors different luminosities? If one color is light and one is dark, the outcome colors will be light, medium, and dark. If one color is light and one is medium, the outcome colors will be light and medium. If one color is medium and one is dark, the outcome colors will be medium and dark. If both colors are the same luminosity, the outcome colors will be that single luminosity.

Using this logic, we can determine that a few examples:

A red saturated light color and a blue desaturated dark color will yield all colors which fit any of the following: Red, pink, purple, or blue hue Saturated or desaturated Light, medium, or dark luminosity

A purple saturated medium color and a purple saturated dark color will yield all colors which fit any of the following: Purple hue Saturated Medium or dark luminosity

As an added feature, we hear that users wish to intentionally pass down similar colors to that of the parents, to make copies of their pretty combinations. So:

If both parents are the same color, that color has an 80% chance of passing down.

This can be workshopped based on user feedback.

Overall, it’s a very fun system!

Name Generation...?

All cats will be generated with a name which can be freely changed at any time. The first iteration of this concept is seen in our breeding demo.

We’re aware the current beta state of our name generator makes some… very silly names! It’s become an internal source of entertainment to laugh at what we get. We’re working on a more polished version that outputs less consistently doofy combinations.

So, what else is new?

As massive as this drop is, we have some other little fun things to share!

Banks, Storage and Safekeeping

We have functionality for a core game mechanic and that is… inventory management!

Items are kept in your storage, with the ability to move your items to safekeeping as a way to remove them from everyday use!

This is common functionality. Nothing exciting. But we have something new to share!

Introducing… banks!

“Banks” are pockets of currency you can keep in your storage. You can create, name, and delete as many as you like! We hope this functionality will be a welcome quality of life for players who organize currency for customizing certain cats, for exchanging items and services, or for saving up for a specific purchase.

Overall, managing your on-site currency just got easier!

Take a look at the functionality.

Scene Building

Scene Building has hit a breakthrough! We have the functionality for the “stickerbook” customize feature. This one tickles me a lot, because it’s so fun to play with.

And as a final check-in, we’ve started on Guild functionality. We have UI designs built out and are moving into the meat. After that, it’s just markets, cooking/crafting, and forums as far as getting the big stuff laid out. Wahoo! Very fun!

To Summarize: We shared a demo drop AND a breeding simulator, resource organization functionality—namely a new feature called banks—and a look at scene building functionality.

What to expect next month: A look at Team and Guild functionality, further assets and mechanic development.

#kickstarter update

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