So much to talk about for the last couple of months. Please bear with me *deep breath*

Catadel is now Catizens!

We have a new official website at https://Catizens.net

This catadel.com webpage will stay around to post updates on the game’s development.

What’s new in Version 0.14

In keeping with superstitions, let’s skip over version 0.13 and jump directly into talking about version 0.14. Here’s what’s new:

A Bridge Tool!

Finally, Improved Bridge Building! you can now click and drag to create bridges of various lengths:

Upgrade to Starting Camp

You can now upgrade your Starting Camp to a Town Hall building. You can also name your town from either the Starting Camp or the Town Hall. The name of your town will show up in the save game title on the main menu.

Upgrade to a Townhall to increase town popularity and unlock inviting citizens from your previous towns to join your current one.

Upgrade Buildings for Comfort

You can now upgrade your housing to have more comfortable beds and chairs

Merchants at the Market

The market has changed. Each day, there’s a chance an NPC merchant will come to your market. You can only buy and sell items when a merchant is at your town. Upgrade your market to improve the list of rare items a merchant carries. Merchants also will pay high price for certain items each time they visit — so look for the deals and sell when there’s high demand.

Don’t forget to talk to your merchant and make friends with them. They might even consider joining your town if a best friend asks.

Short On gold? Try Gold Mines

There are now Gold Mines randomly placed around levels. Mining in a gold mine will yield significantly more gold than mining regular rocks. Keep an eye out for them as you explore a level.

Move Decorations!

You can now move decorations around by selecting the “Move Decorations” option in the Build Menu

Tombstones

More the death of those who sacrificed to make your town possible. When a catizen dies, they will now leave a tombstone as a memorial. You can move the tombstone using the Move Decorations command in the Build Menu.

Group Control Changes

By default, each cat in a group is now controlled individually. To give a command to the entire group of selected cats, toggle group controls by clicking the blue group control button. You can also toggle group controls by using the hotkey “G”

Level 3 Changes

Level 3 has gone through some massive terrain changes. Your old saves will still load, but they will likely not function correctly because the terrain has changed significantly. I suggest restarting the level if you have an old level 3.

Other Improvements

Multi-select for cats is now screen based, which should make it behave more consistently.

Updated textures for all the cats! We’re working on making the cats textures prettier. And there’s a new body type in the works for the cats. A big “Thank you” to the art team!

Cat Requests now timeout. If you accept a request from a catizen, you will be given a certain amount of time to complete the Request (with more time given for difficult requests). You now right click to dismiss requests and left click to accept them. The details are displayed in the hover tooltip instead of a separate pop up dialog.

Added more requests and request difficulty. Now, the second and third requests given by a catizen should be more difficult than the first. As a reward, cats now become permanent residents of your town if they have 3 requests fulfilled. Permanent residents will no longer consider deserting town.

New mouse toy decoration — beloved by Playful cats

The Level select screen has gotten a make over — and there’s now more animation too for when a new level is available.

The various cooked foods (and fish) now add a buff to whomever eats them. Soup increases stamina by 1 for a short while. Fish increases intellect. Milk will now restore a life point to cats who have lost lives due to being knocked out.

Bug Fixes

There have been so many bug fixes, it’s hard to keep track of them all. A majority of the update is actually stability and bug fixes. Here’s a sampling of the more player facing fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused the game to not save correctly sometimes. You will now get a warning dialog if the game somehow fails to save
• Fix for cats sometimes not sleeping in beds of residences they are assigned to
• Fix for scratching post sometimes becoming unusable (new scratching post animation, btw)
• Wild catnip will no longer grow out of control in levels 1 and 2
• Fix for camera jumping to weird locations sometimes if framerate dips while moving the camera
• Fix characters repeatedly trying to interact with objects that cannot be reached

Please let us know what you think of the new build!

Hi everyone,

Catadel was just updated to version 0.12.r28. A lot of new things in this update, so let’s get to it immediately:

New Game Difficulty Selection

You can now select the game difficulty when starting a new game. All existing games are by default “Catsual” difficulty

Catverage (AKA Normal difficulty) differences from Catsual (AKA Easy difficulty):

• increased enemy health and damage
• The Catadel no longer sends daily bread provisions to towns in level 1
• Towns require more popularity points before reaching certain star ratings
• Characters require more exp to level up
• Additional enemies and events exclusive to level 2 (Ex: wolves only spawn on Catverage and not Catsual)

Citizen Requests

Your town citizens will now occasionally have requests for you. Look out for citizens that have a little white speed bubble next to their heads

Select the citizen and then click on the speech bubble next to their portrait to accept or decline their request.

You can have up to 3 active requests at a time. Click the x button to decide to decline any requests that you later decide you don’t want to do.

When you complete a request, that cat will gain a heart, indicating their love for the town has improved:

Complete 3 requests for a citizen for them to reach max happiness with your town. Then you’ll get that cat’s loyalty for a few days, so they will no longer decide to desert town.

New Level 2 Design

Level 2 has been given an overhaul.  The new level 2 is smaller and more stream lined, which more items around the map to explore.

There are also a few more new points of interest in level 2 specific to Catverage Difficulty:

• Goblin Thieves that will have a chance to spawn and steal items from your town
• A Goblin Assault raid will sometimes attack your citizens
• Goblins will now make a bridge on level 2 if your town doesn’t have one after a certain number of days
• Goblin abductors will sometimes spawn in Goblin camps. The abductors will kidnap your citizens if they fall unconscious near the camps.

Other Changes

• New catnip model. New windmill model. New storage location and simple cottage model.
• New pumpkin and cabbage models for when they are ready for harvest
• Cabbages now grow faster than pumpkins, but citizens will get bored of eating the same food for too many days in a row
• New cat model and new animations for and tree chopping, mining , building, and farming
• New Grass texture
• Add Speed 3 option. Speed 2’s speed increase reduced. Cat base walking speed increased slightly
• Added new decorations that are tied to traits. You now do not see the decorations in the town list until a cat with that trait is a member of the town
• You now place a starting camp when first entering level 2. The starting camp has a fireplace and a small tent to sleep in
• Annd a lot more things we lost track of because we’ve been so busy adding new features

Known Issues:

• You’ll lose your old level 2 village if you load an old save — your citizens are still there, but the level data is gone so you’ll have to replay the level
• The build menu will sometimes highlight a different item than what you previously selected after placing a building.

Thank you for playing!

As always, please give us feedback in the discord!

Hi everyone! Wow, has it really been 3 months since the last official release of Catadel? We hope everyone is staying safe with the Coronavirus Pandemic going around. Team Bad Optics has always been a remote team, so we are following guidelines and working from home. We hope this new update will provide you with some entertainment in these trying times.

What’s new:

New Build Menu

All Buildable Items are now shown under the Build Menu

The Build Menu also shows buildings that haven’t been unlocked yet based on talent choices.

You’ll also get a red exclamation and a “New” text next to buildable objects that have just been unlocked.

Decorations

The last tab in the Build Menu is the new “Decorations” section. Here you can find decorative items that you’ve unlocked.

Almost all decorations will be unlocked by having a professional “get to know” a cat with a required trait. For example, to unlock the Wishing Well, you need an Architect who knows the “Miserly” trait. This can be done by either have an Architect who is “Miserly” or by having the Architect talk to someone with the “Miserly” trait.

Other Improvements/Changes:

Level 4 Preview!

You can now try out level 4. Note that we’re still actively working on level 4, so some of the objectives are not yet working and we’re still working on enemy tuning and resource placement. There might come a time when you’ll need to restart your level 4 town if you want to fully experience the level.

New plant models:

New models for crops and pine trees!

Rain!

There is now rain in the game. Cats will get wet when it rains if they are outdoors. Rain is still a work in progress so we will be adding more interactions/UI elements to indicate weather changes in the future.

Trait Changes

• Pessimistic cats will now slowly get more unhappy if they ever go below content mood. Other citizens can talk to them and comfort them, making them immune to pessimistic thoughts for a little while.
• Fisher cats can now fish from schools of fish. Look for Fishing Spots in level 1 and level 2.
• Mean cats can now ask cats that they dislike to leave the town.
• Genius cats now hate being near other cats that have less than 2 intellect.
• Genius cats will also be unhappy if they stay a villager for too long. Give them a job!
• Fluffy cats get wet faster
• You now get just one new town applicants message at 6pm everyday, but you should get the same number as before with 2 applicant times. This gives you more time to try to build enough housing

Other Bug Fixes/Improvements

• Holding shift while selecting actions from the interaction menu will now queue them
• You can now click on the fleas buff to try to solve it. Will work on stubborn cats. Requires a bath house in the level.
• Allow player to zoom out more in level 3
• Make goblins and undead enemies drop gold
• Storage location’s dialog items now not selectable. The dialog is just there for information
• Tearing down a storage location now refunds all materials
• Fix null pointer when periodically updating relationship
• Fix tutorial level town popularity display
• Hook up buffs to acolyte talents
• Add different sound effects and animation states for heal
• Fix save load character button not showing in 21:9
• Cats will now scratch at fleas
• Cats now get a buff when starting a level so the initial set of cats will not consider deserting town for 48 hours.
• Add way to change the name of a cat in the info panel above their portrait.
• Wet cats can now get dry from sitting near the campfire at the market.
• The architect now has to construct stairs before they can be used
• Buildings now start at 0 health when placed
• When out of combat, enemies will run back to where they spawned. Makes enemies leave knocked out characters alone
• Hunter Stealth can now be group queued
• Display time remaining in hours on buffs. Days are now multiplied into hours.
• Do not have market’s roads actually work until the road portion is built. Move market build locations so market can be constructed by more than 1 architect at a time now.
• Socialites no longer try to talk to people that are in combat

Phew! That was a lot of stuff to go over. We promise to not hold on to major updates as long next time. As always please give us feedback in the discord! We love to hear from you!

Wow! Where has the time gone? Before we knew it, the changes and new things piled up into the biggest release of Catadel to date. And we’re excited to share them with you on this Christmas Eve!

So, what’s been happening? Well first off, we’ve got an intern! And he’s been doing amazing work. Check out the Acolyte, the church, and the new Level 3 map! All done by the new intern! We’ve also been trying to add more flavor and life to the trait and relationship system. There so much to talk about, and so little screen space … here goes:

New Level 3

Level 3’s been given a face lift. Resources should be more compact, and the level objectives have been re-balanced. Give it a try and tell us what you think!

Note: sadly, old Level 3s cannot be recovered. If you were on level 3 in a save, upgrading to the new game version will reset it so you’ll have to start level 3 over. You’ll get to keep all the cats and profession levels you had though.

New Class: Acolyte

In level 3, you’ll now get an acolyte in addition to a ranger. Acolytes are a ranged combat unit, who can learn to heal in combat in one of their talents.

Church

Also New: Fleas!

Cats can now get fleas from interacting with plants (chopping down trees, tending to farm crops, & harvesting catnip). The Architect can learn how to build a bathhouse, where flea ridden cats can take a bath to remove the fleas. Cats with fleas can transmit them when socializing with other cats, so be careful not to have an infestation!

Other Noteable Changes

Strength now affects the maximum stacks a character can carry. So a character with 5 strength can carry 5 logs at a time, while a character with 2 strength will only carry 2. If a character is forced to carry something heavier than their strength will allow, they will move significantly slower.

Cats now have to ask others to be their apprentice directly — and sometimes this will fail if you aren’t friends with the other cat. Apprentices now earn exp that can be carried over when they become a professional. Masters can now Offer Advice to apprentices (a social interaction) — this grants some experience to the apprentice. You now get a message when an apprentice can be certified to become a professional.

Cats can now copy traits from their best friends. Once best friends with another cat, a “Copy Cat: insert name of trait” social interaction will show up. You then choose to replace an existing trait with the new trait. You can only copy one trait per day.

There’s a new town rating UI actually lights up stars when you reach that threshold. It was kind of hard to tell if you were on the cusp of completing a star before. Now the stars don’t light up until you actually reach that goal.

Lots of Trait Updates

• Removed Energetic and Thick Headed traits from the starting trait selection — they were too strong as starter traits
• Scaredy cats now only get -1 mood hit from being near enemies
• Dust clouds now show up when a cat fight starts
• Pacifists reworked to dislike engaging in violence and to get a mood buff if they have been peaceful for a period of time.
• Thickheaded, Energetic can no longer be selected in initial list of traits
• Cats with the Hunter trait can now “stalk” an enemy, sneaking behind them and stunning them
• Make more activities scale with Mood. Cats now chop down trees and mine rocks slower/faster depending on their mood. You should see an actual slow down in animation speed.
• Bush cat and tree cat get a buff from sleeping at the right height
• Loners get a buff when they are all by themselves
• Playful cats get a buff when they’ve played a lot
• Charming cats that are Shallow will always succeed at bragging
• Shallow cats can brag about themselves to others and get a stacking buff per successful brag.
• Gluttons get a mood bonus if they eat till full
• Sleepy cats get a mood bonus if they sleep to max
• Changed trait distribution for predefined characters – there should be more variety in traits seen
• Angelic cats will get a bonus to their healing done (Useful for Acolytes)
• Miserly cats will randomly finding gold sometimes. Gold finding chance is based on the cats’s luck stat
• Changed Grumpy to Sourpuss and made it the opposite of playful. Sourpuss cats will almost always reject being asked to be played with
• Added Pessimistic trait, now opposite of Optimistic
• Playful cats get a buff from playing with others and will want to play more than other cats. Playful cats get bored if they don’t get to play with things

Quality of Life Changes:

• Make options menu have tabs now
• You can now save cats in library files and share them with others
• Random cat generation now works — no guarantees that their traits will be a good combo, though!
• Add option to tweak mouse click and mouse drag sensitivity
• Added a green glow effect to characters that can level up. Different notification sound now plays when a character can level up
• Architects will now consider resuming building their last building, if it is far away
• Combat units will prefer attacking the same target instead of changing targets mid fight
• There’s now an ability to view all your cat’s relationships with other cats
• Make buff list be more visible when there are more than 4 buffs on a cat
• Each point of luck now increases dodge and crit chance by 5% (still tweaking this). Luck is now shown in more character selection dialog
• Combat damage numbers now fly up in the UI based on your selected characters. You can see how much damage you’re dealing and receiving

And finally: Bug fixes

• Fix containers in Windmills not being considered for storage
• Fixed autosave file being in a bad state if quitting out of the game while in level select after selecting restart level
• Fix for characters in old saves not having any traits at all
• Fix for select rectangle broken on lower levels
• Fix for characters running away from combat getting interrupted a lot

Hi everyone,
Catadel 0.9.r19 is now live on the Catadel Discord! For Catadel newsletter subscribers, you are all invited to join the discord. If you need instructions mailed to you again, just reply to any newsletter email.

Here’s what’s new:

Relationships!

Your cats can now have relationships with each other. Relationship increases or decreases based on what social interactions you choose to do. Relationship will also decrease slightly over time if two cats don’t talk to each other for awhile.

Cats will also mourn the death of their good friends.

House Assignments

Cats will prefer to sleep in their house. They will also decide to go home if they are somewhere far away and tired.

Improvements/Changes

• Windmill and Outdoor Kitchen UI – you now have to select the buildings and tell them to produce things

Now cats will be able to interact with the flour grind stone inside the windmill.

• New Rock models! There are now small and large rocks scattered about, waiting to be mined.

• Intellect Changes – Each point of intellect increases experience by a larger amount now. Having 0 intellect means you gain no experience. Having 2 intellect is now twice as good as having 1 intellect, etc.
• Sound effects for cooking and windmill
• The save file used for the “continue” will now display its info on the title screen
• Clumsy cats have a new trip and fall animation

Bug Fixes

• Fixed farms getting stuck in rotted field state. They will be reset on load
• Fix for restart level causing people to lose their character progress by an entire level
• Thought balloons for characters are now done in the UI instead of in 3D space — this should make them better visible against the fog. Hopefully without major performance implications
• Fixed character stat adjustments in the Character Customizer not saving
• Allow removing apprentices for professionals at level 1

Known Issues

• The fight animation is not done yet — so cats will just kind of swat at each other.
• The play with animation is also not done yet

Have feedback on the relationship system? Let us know what you think!

Character customizer updates

Trait Implementation 90% complete

35 traits are in and working. What will your starter cats’ personalities be?

New Contributor to Mood: Dirtiness

Cats will get dirty as they perform work. There’s now an action for each cat to groom itself clean. But beware of hairballs!

Other bug fixes and improvements:

• Cows and sheep will try to return to their pens if they wander out
• Wild boar spawn points have been randomized slightly in levels 1 and 2
• When cats are in such a miserable mood that they want to desert town, you now have 12 hours to have another cat ask them to stay. If the miserable cat is not asked to stay within the “Packing Bags” period, they will leave
• Move stables door navlinks slightly — hopefully this fixes the issues with cats getting in and out sometimes
• Fixed character visuals returning to normal if the game is exited while in the tutorial
• Catnip is now the only food source in the wild — and it gives everyone a little mood boost when they eat it. Don’t eat catnip for 3 days straight though!
• Added buttons to rotate characters in the cat customizer — you can see the backs of their heads now
• Added some routing fixes to prevent characters from choosing to go to the same point. This prevents cats clogging up the fire place
• Cats can now sleep near the campfire at night — but tree cats and domestic cats won’t like it

There’s a lot more notes to add, but they are mostly in implementing the 30 something new traits that are now in the game. Please play around with them and tell me what you think! Thanks for following Catadel’s development!

Catadel Closed Alpha is up and running. We’re now on version 0.7.r4! If you’re coming in from v0.6 (AKA the itch.io demo), here’s all the new hotness:

Mood

Cat mood affects whether they will listen to you. You’ll now see their mood on their info bar. Moods are affected through buffs and debuffs, so you can look at a cat’s buff bar to see what’s causing their mood changes.

Cats will work faster when in a good mood and will work slower (and even become uncontrollable!) when in lower moods.

Death Updates

Instead of dying immediately upon reaching 0 health, cats now will enter a knocked out states and their lives will start counting down. Cats start with 9 lives and will die when their lives reach 0. You can direct another citizen to revive knocked out cats. Save them before their lives run out!

Traits

Cats now have personality traits! Traits affect a variety of things from mood to preferences in sleeping location.
Examples:
Optimistic cats have a permanent mood boost.
Sleepy cats will get sleepy more often.
Tree cats don’t like sleeping on the first floor of houses.

Note: Not all traits are fully working. Those marked with (NYI) at the end of the trait name are not yet implemented.

Other New Things

• The game’s been upgraded to Unity’s Light Weight Render Pipeline (LWRP). You will (hopefully) see better frame rates on low end machines. But this comes at a cost of no shadows for point lights (and point lights looking different from before, so your campfires don’t look quite the same)
• Boars have new models! And a death animation! and they make pig sounds!
• New Tutorial Level – please give us feedback on it! Was it helpful? Did you get stuck at any point? Were any of the transitions too abrupt? Is it too slow? Too fast? Difficult to follow? Let us know!
• New Level Select Screen — it’s not finished art yet, but the level select screen’s art should look more compatible with the rest of the game.

Feature Changes

• Removed time limit on Levels — take your time and relax with your cats. (Time limit might come back in a hard mode later on if enough people want a challenge)
• In level select, you must now open the citizens select menu and click accept before you can start the level (makes it so people are aware you can and should bring along additional cats)

Known Issues

Saves are not compatible with the demo. You’ll have to start a new game. This isn’t something we wanted, but was forced because of Unity’s upgrade from .NET 3 to .NET 4. The C# binary serializer just doesn’t migrate between the two.

It’s been so long since I last wrote patch notes that it’s hard to actually list all the changes. But it’s been a long time coming and I’m so glad to have the new version finally out there and in the hands of players. Thank you everyone for your patience!

First off: PAX

Guess what? Catadel’s going to PAX West! We got selected by Indie Megabooth to present at a minibooth there on Sunday & Monday. If you’re going to PAX, please stop by to see us! We’d love to meet you!

Wow, where has the time gone? When we first started talking about the Closed Alpha, it was still early spring of 2019. Since then, there’s been so much going in areas outside of my expertise (AKA doing things that don’t include just making the game). I’ve been making presentations, applying to shows, forming a company, and retaining a lawyer. It’s been a wild ride.

Second Off: Discord & Closed Alpha

The Catadel Discord is set up and the Closed Alpha is ready to go! We’ll be sending out instructions on how to join and install the game from Discord in the next day or so. It’ll be done in waves (so we don’t get pummeled). Keep your eyes on the look out for more info from us soon!

Hi everyone!

A lot of things have been happening behind the scenes here. There’s still some things I can’t talk about quite yet, but know that we’re securing a future for Catadel! Securing funding and help takes quite a long time — and there are lawyers involved and lots of papers … it’s complicated :X

In the meantime, here’s what we’ve been working on for the game:

New Boar Model

The boars you fight finally have a custom model! and sound! Thank you Mindy and David!

Cat Customizer

Soon you’ll be able to create your own cats. We separated the eye and mouth textures so you can now choose both an eye type and a mouth type. We added more mouth and eye options too … O_O!

Traits

Each cat will now come with their own set of traits. You’ll be able to select your own traits in the cat customizer for personalized cats. The traits affect everything from how the cats interact with each other to their sleep location preferences!

I’m still working on getting the Closed Alpha up and running. It was put on the back burner as we did redesigns of the core gameplay, and as I had to deal with the business side of making a game. Expect more details in the next month or so. Apologies for the delay! And thanks for your patience!

P.S. If you notice some differences in the screenshots between this and the last update, it’s because we switched over to Unity’s Lightweight Render Pipeline and the change was not an exact one. But it does get us higher frame rates on most computers, so hopefully you’ll see better performance the next time you try the game!

Sorry I haven’t updated in a long time. Honestly, so much has happened that I’m not sure where to begin anymore. Long story short, I’m still working hard on Catadel.

I’ve gotten some (rightfully asked) questions about how to make Catadel stand out more in terms of gameplay and content. It’s lead to some design changes and vision changes, which means new things to prototype and try out. It also meant I had to write a lot more design docs and presentations than ever — and I’m already not a great writer. Basically, the team is going to focus more on the cats and giving them more individual qualities (like mood and traits). We’re hoping the new focus on the cat citizens will make the game stand out more from existing games in this genre.

Prototyping and trying out the new gameplay means having to get a handle on all the tech debt that had accumulated. Ex: Some data should have been ScriptableObjects instead of MonoBehaviours, etc. Among the biggest pieces of tech debt was needing to upgrade to unity 2019, which meant handling the great prefab migration, which meant fixing up the way all GameObjects are initialized. Not to mention having to merge my changes to unity’s NavMesh Components with the new update components for 2019.

And then I got sick last Monday (like 2 weeks ago) and it still hasn’t fully gone away yet. It’s been one of those rides … so please bear with me.