Hey Catfans!
We’ve been quietly working away on Catlandia as always, and we’re getting close to a new version. Here are some details.
The public demo was an attempt to show Catlandia working in a functional way. You can build your cat, you can talk to characters, you can get through fights, and even complete a quest. But it was very barebones, as you likely found if you played it.
Make the Cats Cuter!
The heart of Catlandia are the cats. These guys need to be cute and fun to move around. So Jessica has redesigned them and added additional art for the NPCs. With this new art, I’ve spent some time redoing the animations. Thanks to some handy YouTube videos, they look a little more catlike now. With these new cats ready to go, we’ll be able to really start fleshing out the worldbuilding and side quests.
And crucially, there might just be a fun little feature involving a certain accessory type coming very soon.
Make the Combat… be Gooder!
The combat in the demo was… It was there. You know, you could attack the enemies and defend, but it wasn’t intuitive, and the only explanation was through an optional long conversation. And also, the enemies were pretty brutal. We accidentally made the Dark Souls of cat rpgs.
So I’ve spent a lot of time revisiting this. The most significant change is that your basic three attacks restore Effort Points… but the most effective one in terms of combined hit chance and damage will restore a big chunk. Because fighting can drain your energy, but fighting well just amps you up. So now, instead of seeing your EP slowly fall to 0 as you use your Meowgic and risk falling asleep, you can use a couple of your Meowgic moves, then before the Zzzs hit, take a round to restore yourself. These attacks still affect a target entering Exposure status, for which all attacks against are criticals, so you can get your EP back while enabling some major Meowgic damage.
Keeping it interesting
The other major change is how defense works. We want Catlandia to involve the player figuring out the best defense to use in any given situation, but doing it by enemy type carries some boring limitations. Two of the three defenses, properly used, allow the player to take no damage. So if you fight something best defended with those options, you only need to set it once, then proceed to win the battle with zero damage.
Instead, enemies now have stances. They’ll be Cautious, Balanced, or Reckless, and the best defense will depend on what they’re currently doing. They have preferred stances that they’ll enter battle with, but once they realize they’re the only enemy type in play, they’ll panic and switch it up. Thus, the battles will stay interesting, and strategies can change over the course of a single battle.
In time, various player abilities will allow manipulation of these mechanics as well.
We Just Love Cats
It continues to be a total pleasure creating this weird little cat RPG we thought up in a bar all that time ago. And it continues to be exciting knowing that people like you support us all the way. We’re going to ramp up our updates as we approach the next release, so thanks again, and stay alert for more cat news!