Definitely how cats are

You've built a really cute little world here, and the movement feels really good. I'm not sure whether there's a bonus for catching all four types of creatures or not, as the leaderboard seems to just record the time you take to get back to the food?

Also managed to top the leaderboard, so obviously that increases my fun rating! haha

you guys always come up with something creative for your games :smile:. this game feels simple yet really interesting, it kept me trying again and again to beat my previous score but no matter how hard I tried the kitty cat always refused to eat. the sounds are really nice and knowing that they were recorded from real life adds more character to the game. I have no idea how people managed to get such high scores, the best path I found was to jump on the rope to skip the first cat then make a crazy jump from the tree to a poll to a house roof to skip the second but I still couldn't go lower than 30s. anyway this was a welcomed change of pace from other action/magic centered games, nice work guys! hope you had fun recording the cat sounds.

Really fun little game, with cool art and music, and nice humor! I tried to optimize collecting animals, but it turned out you only need to go as far as the fish is, without collecting any.

I had fun, nice game!

The game doesn't work for me :sob:
Yellow screen, A and D reversed, S doesn't work.

Great work! cute little game

@wheelsx yupp!! :smile:

@matt-ravenhall thanks for your feedback! The catching of critters does not matter for scoring. We implemented that to let the player have more fun while exploring, and to let the player go to the back of the level before dinner is served :-)

@0x-void-x0 thanks for the big comliments! We try to do something diffrent every time. We realized that we made a platformer, a top down game, a 3D game, a euh... inside-out style of game, a textadventure before. Now it was time for a platformer again. My first LD was a platformer and I got lots of useful feedback from that one. And I can say that this is a massive improvement :smile:

The "meme" is that cats are always picky with their food, there is only one outcome: "food is too old" :grin: I think that the 30-35 second range is pretty good!

We had fun indeed! The audio clips are from videos we made a few months back, we figured that we could use the sound for this game :grin: The birds were recoreded that morning. Picture me in my pijamas outside at 6AM in the garden with a sound-recorder :laughing:

@rolly Thanks! And yess, we set the trigger on catching/scaring the fish, and put them right at the end :grin: Great job finding out! We put the other critters there to make the player explore a little bit.

@helviett that's strange... I tested it and A&D work as espected. S is not supposed to work. Can you share some information about your browser / OS / language settings?

@wigglypainter thanks!

I like this cat :3

I was like when does summoning become involved.. oh! Foodz!!!

Fun small game, the visuals, sounds and overall feeling of controlling the cat remind me of classics such as Alex the Alligator 4 or Happyland Adventures. It was simple but ey, I really had fun playing this one.

The timer caught me off-guard, but I guess that's how it is when you're a cat - minding your own cat business when suddenly the human puts out the crumchies, gotta ZOOM!

As an owner of now three cats, I approve.

It was a nice chill, the sound was doing a lot, it was like I am outside, sitting on the bench, watching cats. At first I thought that the sleeping cat was some kind of bug (haha, cat as bug) as I was holding shift all the time not to scare some prey, but when I caught everything I realized what was their purpose. :)

Thank you for your entry, it was a blast. :)

@iwant-pizza :3

@forager , yea! We figured that the theme would not be that obvious at the start, but we like that actually :-) Let the player explore a little before revealing that this is actually just one big speedrun :grin:

@pierogo Thank you!! The crumchies is all our cat lives for I think :laughing: So, we had inspiration over here :-)

@snory Thanks for playing!! I can see why you thought that, as you were already sneaking :-) But wow, you have three cats? That must be crazy when they get the zoomies all at once :laughing:

Always fun to play a game where you move a cat!

So funny!😁great use of the theme! Love it.

Cool project, the mood is great, and the various path you can take makes it really fun to speedrun.
catching various prey at the same time should give bonuses.
Great entry guys.

Maybe add a random generator for the cats each time you play.

When I figured out that I could climb trees, it was a "wow that's cool, didn't expect that" moment, fun little game

Very cute and fun game! I enjoyed it a lot, the ideas are great and the game is easy to understand! great job!

Yup, we can see who has cats :)


Voice acting was fun :)

The movement speed could have been lowered or screen width could've been wider so I knew what was hiding where. Most of the times, objectives were gathered without even me seeing them. The humor in this game is on point, and I loved the vibrant handdrawn feel. Great job!!

@beauchama we thought so too!

@janinna21 thanks! Ghosts and Devils were the first things that came into our heads, and we thought: "what else can we do", and then the cat came running in because he had the Zoomies at the time and at that point our idea was set in stone :grin:

@alexis-brochec that's pretty clever! We were struggling with the animals being some kind of reward. Their main function is to get the player to explore and to give some life to the level

The random cat functionality is already there! You can just press [enter] without selecting one and it will give you a random cat :-) ~~mostly for debugging reasons, we had enough of pressing the arrow keys to test out a feature constantly~~

@pandalk thats so cool to hear! Thanks for sharing :-)

@edali Thankss!!

@salanyel yepp, do you have cats too?

@jeffrey-hwang thank you for the useful feedback and the compliments!! That is an impressive score you got there btw!

I love the vibe of this game :) Feels silly and fun. The way your objectives aren't really needed to clear the game feels good -- a sort of story telling using the game mechanics itself.

Got sooo close to the highscore but @matt-ravenhall still beat me... grrr...

I also really like this take on the summoning theme. Nice one!

@jezzamon Thank you!! That highscore from matt is insane indeed :sweat_smile: I never thought anyone would reach under 25 seconds to be honest ^^

If you ever made a game that deserves extending, this is the one. But no pressure, it might as well remain what it is, a self contained world that does not need validation from the outside, sort of how cats are. So, I mean, no it's not perfect in game sense, there is no loop (apart from very subtle micro ones), and the tasks bring no reward, there is a sense of overscoping but it managed to fail gracefully rather than crash and burn. Some will be frustrated by lack of clarity when it comes to goals, but like I said its part of this whole game's feel that is akin to a cat.
What sets it apart is how much love was put into it, how much character and lore was packed into just three cats, and especially how enjoyable and fresh it is to move like and have goals of a cat while still within constraints of a familiar platformer controller. And all those little details, too many to list, but for example how the street is called Food Street from the cat's perspective. It even has an easter egg. When you posted describing what you'll do I was like "Umh, ok, interesting.." but you guys really brought that vision to life. Loved it, and I'm a dog person.

Cute game, good work!

Good one! The graphics remind me of old java applet games that were on the internet. I managed to (as of now) get first place! The ambient birds sound really good for a recording (send pls). Didn't see much purpose in hunting the animals, managed to get all of them but I still get called up at the same spot.
I wish that you could go right so that you have two options. Either way, a fun little time killer that has alot of potential if you want to expand upon the idea.

@skvader-418 thanks for the compliments! You can find the bird sounds in the source zip that is listed on this page. It's in the folder "sounds" and is called "vogeltjes_kort.wav" (which is Dutch for "little_birds_short.wav")

Going right would be an awesome addition! We programmed it, so that the fish trigger the "fooood" part of the game, as otherwise I would imagine players being 'smart' and optimizing the fun out of the game ^^"

Edit: congratz on sub 20s!!

@digital-bacon thanks!

@kr4ft3r thank you for the time and effort you put into your excellent feedback! I was thinking about adding some more cats (with different stats?) and more levels. These were in the original idea, but we decided that it would be better to put all the love we have in this level. If you look at the source, you can see that there is some code for level switching already, just in case I wanted to produce a post-LD version :-)

There is a little structure in this game I think: The "catch and explore"-phase, and the point the game becomes a speed run. We were struggling with how to reward the player with the catching of birds and mice, as it was intended to let the player explore the level. Maybe you have some ideas how that could work?

Congratz on finding that easter egg! If this game had powerups, then there should have been one I think :grin:

Thanks again for the constructive feedback! I'm really happy to get some insights from you! Have fun reviewing the other games!

Very cute and charming game. The graphics have a nice cartoony feel to them, and the sound is great. The action is a little too zoomed in to see where you're jumping when rushing back home. It seems the time to get back home is the only score you get, does it matter that you catch all the animals?

@loveapplegames thank you for the feedback! I agree that a wide-view version would have been a bit more easy. Catching the animals is purely for the player to explore a bit of the level and to get far enough to trigger the speedrun. It does not affect scoring indeed

Okay, the voiceover at the end was hilarious :D The game was great. The collisions could use more work though. I tried to be smart and catch all of the food except mice, so that when I catch it last, I'd be close to home (and thus earn nice highscore). But when I collected fish, the timer started anyway. Is that expected?

HOW is everyone getting home so fast??? :sob: I feel like a dumbass! ;w; Could never get below 24 seconds cus of that annoying black cat in my way grrrr.

Anyway!! What a cute lovely game!! The aesthetics remind me a lot of old Windows demo games, especially those grey dialog boxes for some reason. The sounds were satisfying. Running around to catch prey also felt great, though the collisions, running speed and jump arc were very wonky. The game is so short though that it didn't end up being an annoyance. This game really feels like you're embodying a cat, with all their weird social rules around other cats and whatnot, and also how they drop everything they're doing to get food. The prey counter not mattering in the end, ends up playing up this idea lol. Really fun, good job!

Hmm... I am now tempted to play and TRY to get the highscore. Have been playtesting it and did not get that fast :laughing: Thank you all for the feedback, not going to ping you all but the karma should be helpful for each :hugging:

You love cats - I love cats. So I guess that I could appreciate it - and I did. This game is amazing - with an astonishing use of the theme. The main aesthetic is really well done with cute animals. Do you really think that cats can swim? I really appreciated searching for the best way to return home climbing trees, jumping on shelves, etc. Lots of humor - and good voice actors. I always chose the ginger Tom because of my own cat. I had feeling playing with him - strange experience. I was not able to beat the best scores (30.1 s), but I had fun playing. Together you made a solid entry for this 55th LudumDare. One of my favorites so far. Well done. I wish you the best ++


@geckoo1337 Thank you! We are very proud of this one, I love the photo you shared here! So that's Tom? Ours is called Ruby :smile:

Sometimes cats don't mind swimming, but I agree that this is a bit of a stretch :sweat_smile: Glad to hear that you had fun playing!


super cute game my girlfriend and I loved it!

Nice graphics and voice overs. I enjoyed the challenges to get different prey.

Only thing bothering me was controls as the acceleration was somewhat stuttery and I had difficulties performing jumps even when I knew how I should make them.

Other than that, game was nice and cute and quite polished. I even made high score when I finally learned the fast route :smile_cat:

Super cute graphics! The main menu song drives me a little mad haha, sounds exactly like the opening to 'Are you sleeping?'/'Frère Jacques' kid's song, but never hits me with that payoff of the rest of the melody. Also had a lot of trouble playing the game on Chrome :( I wasn't able to jump, and it kept trying to use browser shortcuts for some reason. Luckily it worked fine in Firefox. I had trouble figuring out how to catch the animals since I couldn't jump high enough to avoid spooking them, but eventually I caught everything but the fish when I fell out of a tree, so that taught me that it's basically just how real cats hunt too, and not some magic "collide while in stealth mode" or "sneak then press X to catch something in range". A difficult way to catch them but since catching things is optional anyway it seems fine. The audio and voice acting at the end was great, I love how picky cats are.

Overall, great work! Hope the next LD turns out just as well! :smile_cat:

@joshua-miller-pio Thanks!

@tomssuli thank youuu! I agree, that could have been better

@papabirb Thanks! That song was our inspiration, in Dutch its called "father jacob" ^^

Thank you for the wonderful feedback :smile: