Cat Splat Studios · Toronto
A controller-first 2D action roguelite. Knock an enemy into the air, keep it there, and finish it with a move you only get once. Every level fans out into as many as four paths running east, and one of them ends at the boss.
In development Unity 6 · Windows via Steam · Store page not open yet
01
The kit you carry is two slots wide, one blade and one bow. Everything below describes how those two slots behave at the level of seconds and thresholds, because that is the level at which this game is actually different from the ones next to it on the shelf.
Grounded hits build juggle points. At 60 the enemy launches and hangs at the top of the arc for eight tenths of a second. That hang is the whole air combo window, and it is the same 0.8 seconds every time, so you can learn it.
The execution meter is read before the current hit's points land, which means the finisher is the swing after the one that fills the meter. Each enemy can be executed once.
There is no arrow to lead. The shot resolves along the lane the moment you release, and a clean release inside the perfect window is worth one and a half times damage, read off a charge ring drawn around the player.
The wall jump and the dash cost 200 Gleam each at the hub. The generator knows which of the two you own and only builds rooms you can clear with them, so buying one visibly widens the game.
02
Here is the same eight tenths of a second the game gives you, laid out end to end. Grounded hits fill the juggle meter, and at 60 points the enemy launches. The shaded band is the hang at the top of the arc.
The two marks above the bar are the execution contract. The first swing fills the execution meter and the second one is the finisher, because readiness is checked before the current hit's points land. Stop hitting and the juggle meter drains, so a combo you abandon does not sit and wait for you.
Executed
03
A run is five to seven levels long. The first level and the last one never change, and everything between them is a web you route through yourself. Each level names its own ways out, as labelled doors you press, with the rest between biomes as the fallback. One of those doors is the slip-away, which skips the boss and the boss reward together.
Layouts are a pure function of the seed, so the same run rebuilds itself identically every time. That is how a suspended run resumes without ever serialising a single tile of geometry.
31 routes, enumerated in your browser from the shipped adjacency.
04
Dialogue, boss conversations and the story panels are content, not code. A writer opens a text file or the in-editor authoring tool, fills in the lines, and the game reads them on the next launch. No programmer sits in that loop and no rebuild happens.
The writing for this game has not been done yet. What you can see below is the surface it will arrive through, with the fields left empty, and the pipeline that carries a line of text from a file into the build.
Text a writer edits
GameContent.ini, dialogue files, .room drawings
Editor import
One menu item, validating as it reads
Definitions
Enemies, weapons, biomes, conversations
Validators
Two of them. One fails the build
The running game
And the shipped mod templates
05
Everything above is one codebase with 657 play-mode tests passing and zero failing, two content validators, one of which fails the build, and 21 versioned builds through the Steam pipeline. We take that pipeline into other people's projects.
Character controllers, combat with real hit windows and hitstop, enemy AI authored as data, and procedural generation that proves its own output is walkable.
Runtime debug panels, content workbenches, and scene-view tuners that share their maths with the gameplay code, so the preview cannot drift from the game.
We wrote our own C++17 and OpenGL engine. It has an eleven-pass renderer, cascaded shadow maps, an ECS and a dockable editor. No game has shipped on it, and it is evidence that low-level work does not scare us.
The Steam page is not open yet. When it is, wishlisting will be the single most useful thing you can do for the game, because it costs nothing and it decides how many people ever see it.
