Cats Can Do That: the Demake

A while ago I started making a demake of that game using Pico-8 as a challenge for myself.

I used this as a way to get used to that fantasy console, but also to see how I could make a complete game —with a very limited and safe scope. I started with no schedule but to only take a few months and see how the motivation comes.

Motivation went away after a few weeks unfortunately due to different events in my life (confinement, you know…) but the substance of the project made it easy to finish. I just need to redo what I have made but at my pace.

There were some unexpected difficulties that came though the development. It’s difficult to make interesting variations of cats with the extremely limited color palette, but I am happy of my template system. I have only one sprite of the cat and I switch color palettes to draw the cat I need.

Also Pico-8 numbers have a maximum positive value of 65536 😬. I finally coded an arbitrary point number class. It doesn’t handle decimals nor negative numbers but this was an interesting challenge to try to bypass system limitations just to be able to show the balance at the top of the screen 😅.

For those who have loved the game, this is the same take but with a retro style.

Now it’s almost done, it misses some polish, the tutorial and a bit of balancing before releasing it. This is coming soon…