Rocket 5 Studios

It’s time for our very first Kitty Disastrous game development update! We’ve been crazy-busy working on Kitty Disastrous and a few other things since we showed Kitty at PAX Prime. We had a long crunch leading up to PAX and went through a bunch of gameplay prototypes, testing various art styles (including a 2D version of the game) before we finally hit on a look that we loved.

We finished the PAX demo the night before we flew out to Seattle and I (Tim) didn’t even have a final build until after we arrived. In fact, I was fixing bugs and making adjustments to areas where people were getting stuck right on the show floor. This was the first time that anyone (including us) had played the game with puzzles and cinematics and art and everything all together so naturally there were some issues.

In the end, the response was positive and we came out of the show feeling like we were on the right track. Turns out people like games about cats! Who knew?

We saw a lot of people struggling with the first puzzle and not really understanding the relationship between the main characters, Kitty and Ferris. After returning home to Toronto, I started to rework the layout and puzzles in the opening act. We took a short break to bring The Phantom PI to Apple TV (yay!) and returned to Kitty with a lot of fresh ideas about how we wanted the game to work.

In one of the new puzzles, the old “miser” dude who lives in the town has kidnapped Ferris and so Kitty gets to have a bit of fun tricking him in order to get into his house.

In re-configuring the level layout, we added a bunch of new exterior buildings and interior spaces. The game starts at night instead of day time, and we really are enjoying playing with night lighting for the environments.

Kitty needs to be pretty clever if she’s going to avoid getting in trouble with the law.

That’s all for this update. We’re hoping to do more frequent updates as we continue to work on Kitty in 2016. Keep and eye on our twitter feeds@rocket5studios and @kittydisastrous for lots more!

Happy holidays!