Cat Lady - A Tale of Mystery and Romance

This cat is bored of the show and never even wanted to come see it anyway!

This cat in the background got stood up, and she's just watching everyone else have a great time.

This guy is absolutely pissed at someone, but he's just stewing in his own rage.

Dev partner sent me some updated backgrounds, and I just love them. So many little details and each cat has a different face, different body language, and a different story.

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gonna give this a shot this week! looks great!

#ChooseWiselyFestival has officially started! Look for Deep Pixel Melancholy among tons of other great games.

store.steampowered.com/app/3694190/...

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new background -- heavily composited, still a WIP

If you choose to do so, you can fill in for Terrence Lakeshear's missing actress. But where could she be?

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Be honest. We all know a person AND a cat who acts like Lady Doncaster.

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For #ScreenshotSaturday and #Caturday combined, I present to you...

Max McScruff. The guard at Catterly Manor. Has a penchant for delicious red wines. Could he be capable of murder?

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bar, bare, par, pare, car, care

Always neat to see what people prioritize in UI design. I think it says a lot about the game.

Cool!

Very cool! What made you choose to have a tile opacity slider?

a cartoon of a man laying on his back with the words " nooo why god why " above him ALT: a cartoon of a man laying on his back with the words " nooo why god why " above him

Patrick Duffy

Lady Delphine and Opal Purwell. Patrons of the arts, fans of the occult.

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a monkey sits at a desk in front of a laptop computer ALT: a monkey sits at a desk in front of a laptop computer

What's a visual novel trope that makes you want to do this?

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a man in a white shirt is holding a monkey in front of a sign that says " netflix " ALT: a man in a white shirt is holding a monkey in front of a sign that says " netflix "

Paul Dano

damn i ruined it

my stats are a palindrome. Neat!

What's your favourite game you've had a hand in developing?

My dev partner is now writing a scene for Alan Silvercoat (shown below) and I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

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To be clear, some choices will appear/not appear based on previous discoveries you've made, but you'll never have to present 17 different items and 30 character portraits just to continue the game.

3. The mechanics. While PW:AA and D:THH have some really fun mechanics, they rely on overwhelming the player with options to discourage brute forcing, and frankly, it doesn't work. If you're stuck, you're gonna brute force.

So we're keeping everything in simple choice menus.

2. The mysteries overlap and are tied to each other. They are not episodic, so there's no need to have a rising difficulty curve that gets completely out of hand.

So, there are a few things we are going to do in Cat Lady to prevent this kind of complexity creep:

1. First off, the story progresses even if you fail to solve a mystery. You may even choose to replay the game specifically to see what happens if you don't figure it out.

That case is just a mess. Way too long, nothing makes sense, and I ended up needing to brute force my way through more than one interrogation.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is better in this regard. The cases do get more complex, but overall it still feels fair. Up until the end of the last case (the one that was added for the trilogy).

The second case though? It feels not just like the murderer is trying to cover things up, but that the devs are providing vaguer clues and adding new motivations to make the cases more complex. It's like a JJ Abrams mystery box that they haphazardly come up with an explanation for at the end.

I won't spoil anything, but the first case in D:THH is a lot of fun. It's not too difficult that the player can't figure it out, but it's difficult enough that they don't figure out THE WHOLE THING right away. It's satisfying because you figure it out a few minutes before the in-game characters.

First off, a big pain point I have in games like this -- Danganronpa and Ace Attorney being the main ones -- is that as the game progresses, the next mystery inevitably becomes more difficult and complicated, eventually resulting in an experience where it feels like the devs are cheating.