Tea Pot Crisis And What It Means
Well, we got the demo out when we promised. But you’re probably wanting to know what’s coming next.
Our intent for Prologue is as a prototype for the full Catlandia. So the story is actually going to be pretty short. We only have a handful of other main quests in mind after the tea pot heist. Just enough to give us some practice with different quest structures, really. We don’t want to get bogged down in a big complicated story when the existence of Prologue is precisely because we were getting bogged down in a big complicated story.
But what we are going to do, in order to make Prologue a worthwhile thing to play, is work in a variety of side quests, again, as prototypes for the same type of thing we’d like to do in Catlandia. We probably won’t put any additional main story quests into a demo, but we will likely release side quest content here and there as we continue development, in new versions of the demo.
Near Term Updates
Alright, we know we’ve got some problems. For one, the original demo is only supported in the resolution that I happened to design the UI in, and the UI looks like garbage in anything else. The next demo should feature some more options, as I learn more about scaling and making it look nice. We’d also like to have a browser version so you don’t have to download all these incremental versions. Currently, we think because of the way we’re building the levels, this doesn’t quite work. With a bit of reworking in the process, it should be doable. Truthfully, we always worried that the issue we’re getting would happen, but we were hoping we could get away with it a little longer. Well, no more!
With those done, we’re looking forward to adding in remaining missing obvious staples. Stuff like notifying you when you level up, additional conversation to clarify how the combat, stats and abilities work, a better system for buying abilities, giving you feedback when you’ve got a good strategy going. And also stuff like picking up items, more item uses, more equipment effects, more animation effects during conversations, more characters. Basically all the little pieces that we’ll know we’ll need for Catlandia.
And of course, we’ll have more art. Right now, Fort Pawprint might sound like a sweet little military outpost, but it doesn’t really look the part. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if the cats could wear lil’ berets? And um, other stuff?
Schedule
It took us a long time to get to where we are. Until now, we’ve only shared Catlandia in-person at shows, in very limited capacities. We didn’t want a widely available version out there until we felt like we had covered many of the bases of an RPG. Until we felt like it was functionally ‘completish’ in that you could start up, customize a cat, fight some battles, and complete a quest, with a functionally ‘completish’ set of menus and some awesome tunes. It’s not fully featured, but you can take some meaningful action in the world. There’s no big chunk of the equation wholly missing.
That process took a good year or so (remember, we’re spare-time basement indie devs). But now that it’s over, we’re very happy to share our step-by-step progress. Anticipate us updating the demo version every few weeks, as and when we’re able to add additional features and refine others. If you like providing feedback, this is the phase for you!
Additionally, we expect to have something particularly substantial in time for GDX Edmonton. We had a fantastic time there last year, announcing the project the day prior. So you can bet we’re working on something special!
That’s all for this week. If you haven’t tried the Catlandia demo yet, why not check it out now?