The start of a new game
Hello. There is something I have been sitting on for a while, and I would like to tell you about it.
For the past several months, a very small team and I have been quietly making a cat-cafe game. We did not tell anyone. We did not announce anything. Because what we were making was not really a game yet — it was an experiment, built to answer exactly one question: can the thing in our heads actually be built?
What we already proved
The answer is yes, and we proved it one piece at a time until there was nothing left to prove.
- Cats genuinely wander around the shop. They sleep where it is warm, and they come and rub against your legs when you walk past.
- You can invite a friend into the same shop over the internet, and the two of you run around working in different corners of it.
- A kitchen that really works: raw ingredients, actual steps, finished things you can sell.
- Decorating with a free hand — move a table, change the floor, build the corner you like.
The first time all of it ran at once — a customer walking in, ordering, sitting down at a table I had just arranged myself, a cat crossing in front of them to go sleep under a chair, and a friend standing behind the counter — I sat and stared at it for a long time. It was the picture I had always wanted to play.
So why start over
Because everything we built was made to answer a question, not to be played for a long time.
It is like a show home thrown up quickly to see whether the floor plan works. Once you have walked through it and you are satisfied, you know which rooms should be bigger, where a window belongs, which side the door should be on. The right next move is not to repaint the show home. It is to go and build the real house, with everything you just learned baked in from day one.
People have asked whether it hurts to throw the old work away. Honestly, not at all. The most valuable thing was never the code. It was knowing how a game like this should feel to play — which moments make people smile, which ones make them bored enough to quit. You cannot buy that. You only get it by building the thing and sitting down and playing it yourself. And now we have it.
So that is what we are doing: starting again from the foundations, but not from zero, because every lesson from the experiment is still with us. We know what is fun and what is dull, and which ideas sounded great until we actually played them. This time we are not guessing any more.
What this place is
This site is where I will tell you the story as it happens. I did not want it to look fancy or official. I would rather it felt like one of the tables in the shop, the one where we sit and talk. There are three corners to it.
- The roadmap — a living list of what I am doing now, what is finished, and what is planned. It changes all the time, because the game grows on its own schedule.
- The devlog — stories like this one, with whatever pictures and clips I have to show.
- The music — cafe music written specifically for this game. Free to listen to, and you do not have to wait for the game to come out.
The only thing I can promise right now is that I will keep telling you the truth as it happens — the days it goes well, and the days a whole week of work gets torn up. As for when the game will be finished: I would rather not say, because anything I said would not be true.
In the meantime, if you want a bit of the shop's atmosphere to keep you company, put the music on. See you in the next entry. 🐈☕