Tails of Cattown

My current project is OS:TRi, a sci-fi dystopian VN about robots on Mars. It follows the adventures of Skyler, a hot headed hacker who becomes public enemy number one after she "accidentally" steals the advanced new sentient computer program Trinity from the largest Mega Corporation on Mars.

The story is an homage to cheesy young adult dystopian novels, with an emphasis on found family and identity, with several slow burn romance options.

(Yes you can be gay)

It is currently in development for PC platforms, to be released in several parts (starting with a free demo of the first few chapters)

Check out the OS:TRi carrd for more info:

My previous visual novel project was out of the bag, a short Natsume's Book of Friends fan game that I made to test out the process of developing VNs. It follows one of the secondary characters, Tanuma, after he finds a cat that looks suspiciously like his best friend Natsume. Shenanigans ensue.

It is currently available for pay what you want download on itch.io: https://cattowngames.itch.io/out-of-the-bag

I also have a patreon where I post behind the scenes content, like character sprites, process art and timelapses:

First art fight attack! Ft. @eskiworks very cute kitties :)

Also timelapse, cause I thought it'd be fun to share these too! Watch me go ham with leaf brushes in CSP

Yes I did speedrun basic sprite art for Trinity specifically so he could have matching art fight icons (and character refs) with Skyler and Ethan lol

Joining art fight this year for the first time! Team mystery of course (yes I did make a Mysterious edit of my mayor mascot specifically for this post lol)

Also just uploaded a bunch the full sprite art and concept sketches to my patreon for anyone interested.

There's also some outfit concepts for a little guy ;)

Finished updating Skyler and Ethan's sprites, so here's a look at them in action! I used this plug in that lets you edit the sprites in game, which works very well for showing off all the different expressions and outfits (tho most of the new outfits are just rough mock ups cause I won't need them for the demo chapters. and the bg I just haven't finished yet lol)

For the more minor characters this wasn't that big of an issue cause they didn't have that many variations... but Skyler and Ethan also get costume changes later in the game in addition to all the expressions (they can't just wear their work uniforms the entire game lmao), so I'd need an ungodly amount of sprites if I exported them all as individual images. So I'm obviously not doing that. Instead, I'm going to format them as layered images, which let me just lay the different individual expressions, outfits, etc, on the base sprite in game instead of exporting everything individually. Great! Much easier.

This does however mean editing the sprites so that the clothes and expressions are separate from the base sprite, which needs to remain consistent. Not too big a deal, the expressions are already on separate layers, it just means making a no clothes version for the outfits. but oh if I want different poses/hand gestures I need the arms to be on a seperate layer. so I guess I need a base sprite with no clothes and...

...no arms...

oh...

Updated some of the designs/bios for some of the secondary characters from the game so I figured I'd make a new post, plus... brand new character Naomi! She's a former classmate of Skyler's who was Supposed to be a minor side character who would (unintentionally) help Skyler to dirt on the New Secret Project, but then I realised what her being on The New Secret Project meant for the story and she became Way more important

aka she is definitely going to have a good and normal time working for the definitely-not-evil-mega-corporation :)

you can see more of her sprites on my patreon if you're curious ;)

Hey I finally have a new update! This time it's new logos, cause I realised when writing the script that I needed a logo for the game's Mysterious Resistance Group 'ROS:KAI. And then figured I should make one for the megacorp too. (I also changed their name from ARES.CO to ARS.TEC cause it's a better play on 'Ares' and Mars'. and more symmetrical. and also makes for better inappropriate puns)

As for the story: ARS.TEC are the megacorporation behind all the technology of the Mars Colony all the characters live on, and the people Skyler unfortunately ends up on the Bad side of after she "accidentally" steals their shiny new sentient computer program.

ROS:KAI are a mysterious resistance group ARS.TEC has been trying to shut down for years after multiple attacks against their facilities, but they still haven't been caught. Little is known about them, as they exclusively wear all black spacesuits, making their members hard to identify.

If you want to see more of the process of making these logos, I just uploaded a bunch of process sketches to my patreon:

while I'm at it I may as well share some of the other menus, here's the chat screen, which is actually just an altered version of the base NVL mode, cause that was the simplest way I could think of to implement it. it took a while to get all the pieces of it working together to look like an actual chat program (complete with an updating friends list) but I'm happy with how it turned out!

I also have a stats screen that shows your own in game stats and friendship/romance levels with each of the characters

It's been a while, but I finally have an update to share! I finally had some free time to work on the script for the game and... ended up replacing the entire glossary system instead. oops

It turned out the one I had been using wasn't very good at accounting for duplicate entries, so if you used the back button you'd just end up with several of the same entry, which wasn't ideal, so I found a new one

I ended up using this encyclopaedia plugin, which is. way more complicated than I really needed (and took me a while to figure out) but it offers a bunch of sorting options and seems to more reliably keep track of persistence, which fixes the problem I had been having.

It did take a fair bit of wrangling to get the interface to match the rest of the menus, due to the base plugin being made of multiple copies of the same frame instead of one big background image, but I got it working after a lot of trial and error.

Here's a comparison between the old one and the new one:

Old:

New: