Updates From Day Four: Reaching Feature Complete, a Smol Worm, and the Smoothest UI Ever
Also: A fun, interactive carving experience, more lore, and chisels with impeccable linework
Our Cat Tale Discord this week has been filled with hourly exciting updates, with every worm working hard to improve the soil structure, recycle nutrients, clean up contaminated land…a worm’s work is never done.
After a March Madness style bracket multi-day vote for our game’s name, we’re so excited to announce that Carving with Care is well underway and set to launch a vertical slice (playable proof of concept) next week on Tuesday, Nov 19. Today, we’ll be sharing updates from every department and its team members working hard on our self-care and wellness centered game that’s sure to wiggle its way into your heart.
Art
Here’s the current draft of our characters, Member of Thieves Guild - Puck, Grieving Witch at the Well - Ekundayo and of course our fisherman with his worm friend all done by our artist Ally Studham.
Becca (@becdar) has also been working on menu art, backgrounds, and the tools that will be used in-game! Here is how that’s looking as of day four:
Production
You’ll have the deep dive in tomorrow’s Substack update on how our production team is making sure that our developers don’t burn ourselves out on a game that is the antithesis of that but for now, have this mid-newsletter reminder to take a quick stretch break.
So far, most of our team has remarked that it’s been the smoothest game development experience that they’ve had. Our team lead Cris Luu and production manager Sisi Peng, in charge of audio, design and engineering, also took on more of the pre-production workload. Becca will take on additional production alongside her current narrative and art production responsibilities as we get to the final stretch (did you stretch earlier?) of the project when we’ll be focusing on pitching.
Programming & Design
We’re pairing up the programming and design section here to focus on more of the above-the-hood updates on how the gameplay will look like. Our programmer Russ Matney has been using a built-in Unity structure called a LineRenderer to help make the IRL life experience of carving wood come to life within our game.
Essentially, the structure records the current mouse position over and over to build up the 'carve' itself. We’ve been liking it since it’s a drawing tool with strict rules/logic added on top of it, making it possible to reach a customized, satisfying wood carving experience. Our game design lead Marc Magruder has helped research and make the crucial experiential design choices that is both fun and cozy, but not something that’s meant to be sped-run. Here is what the carving process is looking like as of day four:
Curious about the code behind the magic? Don’t make us tap the sign (subscribe): You’ll hear more in a future edition of our Substack!
Audio
Ok, we’re feeling like this newsletter could use a bit more worm right around now. Cris our audio producer/team lead has been hard at work creating and curating the vibes. Have a short listen to our main menu music, featuring wormy worm:
You’ll want to definitely play our game when it’s out next week to experience the rock drum ending at the 1:00 mark of the song. Who said cozy gaming couldn’t also be a headbanging-worthy experience?
They’ve also been hard at work in the studio capturing foley audio to make those smooth wood carving noises feel real as well as working on additional background music.
Marketing & Community
Oh hey! That’s me, Margaret Lin! I’ve been hard at work writing these newsletters from various locations of the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library systems and thinking about The Future for Cat Tale and Carving with Care.
If you’re a publisher reading this and want to make $ into $$$ and like our vibes, our contact information is available on our Carrd page.
Programming & UI
Have you ever spread butter, jam or peanut butter on to your toast and been like, “Damn, that’s smooth.” Well, we’re here to present an even smoother experience than that with our UI experience as of day four, courtesy of our programmer Tess Winlock.
Don’t be fooled: There's a lot of machinery under the hood to create something so smooth. She’s created this so we can eventually add in a scroll bar that moves the characters and the player’s workbench along with it.
She’s also been focusing on documenting the engineering and narrative integration as well as working on our menu. Both Tess and Russ have been working together to connect the bits our various departments are working on.
Narrative
You saw a quick sneak peek of our characters in the art section as well as a preview of our creative process in yesterday’s edition but there is so much more worldbuilding, dialogue setting, rune symbolism creation, and logic building (as seen on the left of the above image) happening as well.
Our characters all, as of this moment, have had at least three alternate, intentional names with one character having eleven alternate names as of this time of writing. We’re also mapping our characters’ relationships with one another. All of this work has been a combined effort of Galen Skibyak, Sisi, and Becca!
When it comes to logic building, we’ve pulled parts from Cat Tale’s previous game, Bots-n-Bloom and Galen and Tess have created a system that will work for both the upcoming vertical slice as well as be primed to be flexible if this game were to be developed into a fuller experience.
We also created an entire rune system with each rune representing various self-care and lore-building elements. The sketches and concepts came from the above listed team members and the final execution came from Marc! You can see it on the right side of the above image.
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See you tomorrow for a deep dive on production!
Our team’s full bios are available on our Carrd page.