🐱 Cat Fun Factory by gamescodedogs

Welcome to the 🐱 Cat Fun Factory
🐱 Cat Fun Factory is a game about building and automating park for cats to collect data and learn what they really want. Use machine learning and the award-winning "IF-ELSE" tech. Collect enough data to create A Universal Problem-Solver for cats.

Digital Factory
Everyone can easily imagine a regular factory, but what is going on inside a “digital factory” like Amazon or Google?) How they understand what to offer, how to attract users, how reviews influence their business? We want to make a tycoon/sim game about digital factories, machine learning tech, and digital marketing.
Team
The game was made by 4 people: Ivan, Sergey, Alexander, and Oleg from Luden.io. Let us know your thoughts https://discord.gg/ludenio
Theme
We've interpreted the theme "Keep it alive" as "Keep the factory working to collect data". It looked like a perfect idea back to Friday's night :))
Why
We are big fans of Machine Learning tech and cats. Also, we love to see games explaining something and sparking curiosity.
https://youtu.be/NWSgu12PLP8
Thank you for stopping by and please stay safe 😊
Ratings
| Overall | 362th | 3.885⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 211th | 3.918⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 212th | 3.893⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2400th | 2.713⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 521th | 4.1⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 406th | 3.759⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 138th | 4.017⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 642th | 3.702⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 102🗳️ | 111🗨️ |
Anyways, good work for a simulation/tycoon game in such a short time, the UI looked great
What a shame, this game looks really fun! I'll try it again if you find a fix for it.
First all cats just started moving in one direction, off the map, and then no other cats would spawn.
Other than that I had a great time building and planning, it's a well made game, especially for being made in a gamejam!
@lamossus yep, our bad, unfortunately we decided to "invent" a brand new way to render the world... on Ludum Dare... That's why we have troubles with roads sometimes. You can connect them only by dragging with pressed right mouse button. Just imagine that it is a brush from Photoshop :)
However, I did encounter the bug described by @jefvel and others. The one with cats suddenly just moving off the map and no other cats produced. I also encountered another bug, when a game would just place whatever I had chosen to build in the path of my mouse cursor (like a game thought that I was clicking even though I wasn't). That bug I fixed by pausing/playing several times.

The Machine Learning part is maybe a bit of a stretch, but it's a cool concept and done in an interesting way nevertheless. Fun, captivating!
It's a well-done game, with art and music that go great together.
Congratulations!

Let's get the bad parts out of the way first:
- Roads. Arrgh, roads. The tutorial just says that I can connect via dragging. Tried that, I can't, nothing happens. Turns out I have to select the "road block" first. Its button doesn't exactly look like a road, and... you know that a "roadblock"/"road block" is something that *blocks* roads, right? Clicking that button and then dragging took me a fair bit to figure out. I had multiple things researched before I built my first road.
- And they only merge in front of machines? So much for properly parallizing my cat desire classification.
- And often they don't really align well with the machines, especially the upper part of splitters.
- As @uberardy mentions, Machine Learning seems a bit of a stretch here. And digital marketing too.
- The theme connection is pretty weak.
- Unless I'm misunderstanding something, there doesn't seem to be much strategy apart from the obvious. Once you figure out how stuff works, not much thinking is required. Not ideal for this type of game.
And now, with *that* done, let's get to the good parts:
- It's cute!
- It's refreshing - I haven't seen any games like that yet in this Ludum Dare, and barely any in other LDs I attended.
- It looks good!
- The music is well made and fits. Games like that are usually played for a stretch of time, and the music blended well into the background.
- You don't just have a starting cutscene with a great style, but also an ending cutscene. Wow!
- You actually have a tutorial. And not just one in the beginning, but one that shows multiple windows. (Although I am not sure it is strictly *needed* - I figured it out just as well myself, because, I built my first road later I didn't even see it, and when it started it mostly showed me things I already knew - but it's nice that it's there for the players who it helps.)
- It can't have been easy to develop all the mechanics in such a short time.
All in all, this is a really great jam game, and one of the most complete feeling I've seen in this LD so far. Great job, folks!
PS: I have a question about the first GIF in the description. Why do so many cats walk past the scratchers and sleeping pads even though they aren't full? In my factories, they always seem to go away angrily once they encounter the first machine they don't like, even if it's to the side of the road. Maybe I misunderstood something?
* The tutorial isn't clear on how to build roads
* Building roads is clunky because they don't auto update (player has to manually fix connections to machines)
* The sprites of the machines make it hard to understand how to align them
* The special splitters should be locked until you have unlocked a survey machine
* Theme connection isn't there
So we rushed into the programming headfirst. After 40+ hours everything was looking good, except the awful road-building because of the number of bad tech decisions we've made. So I made the GIF and went to sleep.
In the morning it was strange, I understood that cats just ignoring spots they don't want to visit :) So the main idea of figuring out what they really want was ruined. We've fixed it but didn't update the GIF :)))
I really glad that you highlighted it, players like you are the biggest source of inspiration for us! Take care.
> cats are cute, but they don’t make a game.
Sure, I think everyone can agree with that. There was no intention to place cats into the game to replace the gameplay.
> The tutorial isn’t clear on how to build roads
> Building roads is clunky because they don’t auto update (player has to manually fix connections to machines)
We will remember this roads for years I think, it's so funny how we invented troubles for ourselves with this simple thing :))
> The sprites of the machines make it hard to understand how to align them
Make sense
> The special splitters should be locked until you have unlocked a survey machine
Maybe
> Theme connection isn’t there
Originally it was very logical to us (take a look at the "Theme" section of the description) but now it looks really weak :)
So I'd like to add that the game is very funny and I liked it.
This game is really well made, the theme connection is a little bit weak but it's ok, it's a great game anyway ;)
I really liked the intro, it's kind of rare in Ludum Dare games. The graphics and audio are super nice.
Good job! :)
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/615952171?t=3h43m17s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin