Adventures in Cat Space

Adventures in Cat Space is a “Celestroidvania” about a cat named Fender who wakes up in an unfortunate situation. He finds himself trapped in spaceship where he’s defenseless against the threats around him and must use his cat-like instincts and abilities to escape the nightmare!

The current version is a demo that was designed to be playtested at a local game event back at the end of 2019. It showcases some of the design features of the game such as upgrading abilities and Celeste-style platforming sections.

The game was in still in development in the early part of 2020 and ended up effectively going into limbo during the pandemic. There are currently no concrete plans as to whether or not development will continue on the game beyond the demo.

• Design and Unity Implementation: Dan Hassett
• Sprites & Music: Jordan Baker
• Concept Art: Tyler Osgood

Development

Adventures in Cat Space originally began as a one month game jam project back in early 2017. In an effort to learn game development and to make more games, I began undertaking the One Game a Month game challenge with my friend Jordan Baker.

Adventures in Cat Space was supposed to be our third platformer in which we were looking to expand on our two previous projects (the first one being a basic, single level platformer, and the second one being a run and gun, Contra-style platformer with two levels).

The game was planned to be a micro Metroidvania, but eventually evolved into the idea of something more akin to a typical, twitch-based platforming game without offensive attacks. Originally, I began to develop a typical attack system for the game, but what happened as the project progressed was that the anatomy of a cat turned out to be troublesome for certain aspects of the original design.

Due to some of the weirdness that we ran into, I eventually realized that moving the design in the direction of games like Super Meat Boy and Celeste was a much better fit for the theme (the theme being something that I didn’t want to change).

The design sought to accomplish the world layout of games like Super Metroid and Hollow Knight mixed with short room-based challenges which slowly incorporated new player abilities and mechanics. It does this through the use of things like keys and ledges where the player cannot progress without certain abilities.

The Theme

As many people know if they own a pet, sometimes they do hilarious things that humans don’t understand. Making a game about my cats was simply an amusing idea that seemed like an interesting canvas to design from.

My cat Fender is a truly special cat who comes across as part dog at times through his behavior. I used to own a second cat (who sadly passed away in 2021) who had a tendency to make Fender’s life worse in a lot of ways (stealing toys, fighting, etc.). This idea turned into a retro-futuristic space game about a nightmare Fender was having. The plot involved my other cat as an Emperor Palpatine type figure who had captured Fender and trapped him in the spaceship where he needed to escape.

The layout of the game as a whole was designed in three sections: a spaceship, the moon, and a moon temple. Each section was designed to have a distinct feel to it with it’s own enemy faction. The inspiration was drawn from the game Destiny, where there are a number of different environments which generally house a specific type of enemy.

Audio

While there wasn’t extensive work done to create brand new audio for the game at the point that development paused on it, there was some preproduction work on what the music in the final game should feel like. That playlist (audio mood board) can be heard here:

Concept Art Gallery