Sup Herders?

We just pushed out our biggest update yet! Featuring a new, spooky village map where you will be hunted by a spoopy spirit cat. Can you herd the cats AND survive?

Additionally this update includes the Cat Cannon, a new item that fires cats in a (very) general direction and can be pretty useful for getting cats out of those hidden spots and a little closer to the goal! We think it's pretty stupid and we hope you all like it too.

This update has been a couple of weeks in the making. The cat cannon was something I started on almost immediately after our first release as a way to add a bit more chaos to the game, and I think it works pretty well. It was tricky to not have the cannon be too overpowered - the first version made it super easy to just attract all the cats in a level to the cannon and have them shot into the goal. This has been a cool learning curve in indie dev for me - balancing things always seemed like kind of a dark art but I think we found a good compromise in the end! This stuff actually reminds me a lot of my days writing simulation software for astronomy, where you're always trying to balance accuracy and performance.

Adding the ghost mechanic and sorting out the lighting for the Halloween map was another fun challenge. Regarding lighting, this is the first Cat Herders level that doesn't just use one massive directional light for most of the illumination, and it's been fun/frustrating to learn this stuff. That being said, the level is still more performance intensive than it should be. Don't worry, we're working on it! The cat ghost we supposed to be a combination of stupid and unnerving, maybe echoing the classic Slender: 8 Pages. I'm still not entirely happy with the ghost behaviour but I think it's pretty fun (and it freaks my fiance out).  If anyone has any feedback though, we'd love to hear it!

One final note - the Halloween map is known in-game as Village, and it's harder than our other maps. Definitely a good time to try split-screen if you didn't already!

Cheers,

Tom

(also Kavey and Anna)