Hi everyone! It's been a dry period with few updates so I wanted to give you a little bit of news on where we currently are in the development journey.

Status of Adventuring

July was very quiet and August is going to be quiet as well. I am currently putting all of my time and energy into finishing up Adventuring. The core features will be finished up within the next couple of weeks and then I'll be finishing up the content for the first location. At that point, it will be a lot of bug fixes, small tweaks, and balancing changes. I still do not have a set timeframe for the pre-adventuring update, because sometimes bugs take 5 minutes to fix and sometimes they take a week to fix, but it is most likely to fall sometime in September with a full release coming just a couple weeks after if all goes well.

Bug fixes, small content updates, and so on are very likely to be slim until adventuring shows up. On one hand this is good news because it means I'm close enough to feel comfortable putting a laser focus on completing it, but also bad news because you probably won't hear from me on a lot of the entire rest of the site until it's finished. In theory this kind of dry spell won't happen again because at that point, almost every feature still on my pending list either builds upon existing features or is easily broken up into small pieces added steadily over time.

To tide you over until the next update, I've got some screenshots of an adventure in progress so you can actually see what adventuring looks like right now! These will be included in the next post in this thread.

Next Registration Period

Because of all of this, I do not currently have an estimated date for the next registration window. I'd like to wait until after adventuring drops before I increase the userbase any further to decrease the chances of the adventuring update overloading the site. It's going to change the server load patterns a lot and if there are any major bugs it's easier to wrangle them with less people around.

The next opening might be in September, but it also might not be until later in the Fall, depending on how things go from here. I don't want to give a set date because I don't want to promise late September if something in adventuring goes wrong and it ends up not being possible until a month or so later.

It's very difficult for me to predict the timelines of releases and such because so much of what I have the energy to do is dependent on what my irl job's situation is. My irl work responsibilities are very volatile and since I've been in my current position for less than a year I still don't have a great idea of when the busy periods are.

Forum Helpers

We've welcomed 3 new forum helpers to the team, all with a strong track record of helping out in the forums! Hello and thank you to all of them.

We got a ton of awesome applications from great people, so if you didn't hear back from us don't fear - we'll definitely be going back through them again when the site gets larger and we need to expand the team again.

Art Streams?

I've started streaming adventuring art on twitch again (after procrastinating streaming for like 6 months). There's a link on the front page, so feel free to stop by if you want to say hi and distract me from what I was trying to do experience the art process. Absolutely not a schedule because every day I say "I kinda want to stream art again today" and then I don't do it, except sometimes I do.

There was one last Monday, and might be another one tonight or tomorrow night (or there might not be, not even I know).

Adventuring Screenshots

Here's an image of what the "between encounter" menu looks like. The top bar shows on every adventuring page and is a visualization of how far along in the adventure you are. Monsters get a little harder the deeper you go into the location, and at the very end there's a boss battle with special unlocks. There are also some "split in the path" type transitions, such as choosing whether to journey into the cliffs or follow the river, which can lead to completely different sub-areas.

You'll want to expect that, for new players, it might take you a few attempts of leveling up and learning and building resources before you're able to progress all the way to the end without having to head home at some point.

For those of you who have been around, the first location might be very easy for you. It's balanced for someone whose cats are not even friends and who doesn't have access to any items. If you've all stocked up on the goods and the snacks and your cats are all BFFs, you're gonna fly through adventuring location 1.

The level cap for release will only be level 4 (of 13 levels that have abilities and unlocks implemented) to prevent you from getting too far ahead of the second planned location.... and also to stop those of you (you know who you are) from getting tempted to grind your cats all the way to level 13 on 1EXP level 1 baby monsters (which would be suffering and not fun at all ).



Here are some screenshots of the skill challenges with placeholder text. You'll run into two kinds. One where you pick something to do, and then all of your cats have to do that thing together. The other is where you pick something to do And you also get to pick which cat will try to do it.



And now for a few screenshots of the battle. Here's the opening screen with the infamous Leaf Mite, certified testing baby.



The next image is a prompt for your cat to move around the map. In addition to normal movement, there are special skill-roll requiring movements for Climbing, Dense cover like brush/bushes, Cliffs, Pits/Holes, Swimming, balancing on rough terrain, and maybe another I'm forgetting.

Not all of these will exist in the first location. This is true for a lot of the adventuring locations. I'm building the system so that when I add new locations, pretty much everything is already in place. New locations will be fully front-end development after the first drops. A lot of work is going into this that won't show up for probably years of development in the future.



Below is the action menu and item menu. There are dozens of actions and status conditions, including things like area of effect attacks, pushing enemies back, protecting allies, the thief's ability to pickpocket monsters and run off with bonus loot, etc. A lot of these won't show up before level 4, but they're coded in.



Here's a simple attack result display:



This is the loot / end screen, it's still looking a little bit funky but will be wrangled. If your cats level up, you'll also be gifted one of the little reward bundles. For level 1-4, the reward bundles won't have a huge amount of stuff in them, but as the levels get higher, the bundles contain leveling-exclusive clothing and decor, and a large amount of notes and essence fragments.

Leveling up all of your cats will likely become your biggest source of currency, as well as selling spare collectables and other items you get in adventuring.



And that's all for now! Bosses will unlock all kinds of things the first time you defeat them, depending on the particular location, like new cat slots, new scenes, ability to use that location's backgrounds in your own scenes, and some secrets.

I don't know what possessed me to make adventuring so complicated, but it is going to give so much space for all of you and I to be super creative in strategy, builds, level design, etc. so I'm really looking forward to getting to play around with it. (And there's the side effect of sometimes the bugs are super amusing. For example, if I accidentally design a map in certain ways, your cat attempting to hide in a bush and failing could have the cat punted out of the bush and all the way across the river. Jury's still out on whether this specifically is a bug or a feature. As we all know, foliage can NOT be trusted. )



And that's it for this update. I don't know why I called this a "mini-update" when I infodumped so many words, but that's what I've historically called no-content updates so I thought I should be consistent.

No new content, just words - Hopefully I didn't forget anything I wanted to say in here!

pilot smashes but item smash too :c

Ahhh I'm so excited! and welcome to the new forum helpers!

so excited! it looks so cool already!

So excited to get more insight into adventuring! Can't wait for it to get released, but do take all the time you need!

Adventuring looks really fun so far! I can't wait to take my cats to battle evil... and leaf mites.

I'm super excited for the coming update. Thanks for letting us see the process, I absolutely love the way the battle system is almost like dnd. Also, the callout about level grinding is correct, and I definitely would've done it lol.

Anyway, good luck with finding and fixing any bugs, Goodspeed squid.

So much excitement, this looks amazing! And a huge welcome to the new forum helpers