The Spy Who Shrunk Me turns five! 🎉
It's been a long time since we've piped up here, but here's the good stuff: you're getting an all new, Steam-improved soundtrack directly to your Steam library - to celebrate the 5th anniversary of The Spy Who Shrunk Me.
Read on to also get a sweet retrospective that may answer your questions like, is there gonna be a sequel, what happened to Catland and why is that one bug still not fixed. Trust me, it's a goodie.
The Soundtrack
The original soundtrack composed by Oskar Nieminen features nearly an hour of epic spytastic theme tunes, pulse-pounding combat music and that really catchy tune we used for the mandatory vehicle section. All 21 tracks are available through Steam's neat soundtrack system - so it'll appear in your Steam library under "Soundtracks". It's free - as a thank you for playing the game!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/913240/The_Spy_Who_Shrunk_Me__Original_Soundtrack/
Looking back at The Spy Who Shrunk Me: A Brief Retrospective
As most of you know, Catland is long dead. The game IPs were bought out by the CEO & creative director Tomi Toikka (me, the one typing this post) in order to preserve them even after being lost during all the winding-down-a-company hustle. I really think Taphouse VR and The Spy Who Shrunk Me deserve to be enjoyed by gamers long after the company is gone - so I've been preserving, discounting and nurturing them since we wound down operations.
Let me take you back on a history lesson.
The birth of Catland
We made Catland during a business incubator called Nordic VR Startups (after branded as Nordic XR Startups), and we released our first title, Taphouse VR (which celebrates 6 years, check out the announcement post below - also soundtrack as a gift) in just four months. We started with just 3 devs.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/591680/Taphouse_VR/
Virtual reality was still in its infancy, and we wanted to do a game that really took into account the power of virtual reality. So of course we thought about unique VR stuff - the sense of scale, the feeling of being-there, and changing the scale of the world.
Project Spygame is started
I got the idea to combine a sort of Austin Powers vibe to an oldie-but-goldie long lost game series called No One Lives Forever combined with the player having a shrink ray, and the idea for our next game The Spy Who Shrunk Me was born.
Here's a really antique YouTube video to show the first prototype state of the game in all its asset-flipped glory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mneLu0g8BiQ
This is how we pitched the game to the incubator, investors and everybody. It was pretty neat. Yes, I have extremely shaky hands.
So what wound up happening was we got a funding round for the company from a big Finnish venture capital company! I hired the best people I knew to pull it off (about eight people at max capacity, if I recall), but frankly, the game idea was too ambitious for anyone of us and we really bit more than we could chew.
Shipping fast doesn't mean shipping good
The problems started to arise with the ambitious release plan; we started pitching this November 2017 and wanted to release it the following year. The final release date wound up being December 18, 2018. Then; VR started losing steam (heh) when customers weren't really into all the VR stuff as they used to in, say, back in 2016.
So we had to pivot the game to both PC and VR just to get a sizable enough audience to get the game going. We had no idea what we were doing - for Unity, we were using an asset pack called UFPS at first but ditched it once we realized it wasn't as expandable as we wanted. So, boatloads of technical debt, never shipped and FPS game before, never done enemy AI before...you could see where we were going.
A disasterpiece
It got pretty ugly at times, and I must admit I wasn't at my best. What ended up shipping was a rough estimate of what we really wanted to ship. We rightfully got roasted for lackluster AI, poor controls, bugs, general jankiness and inconsistent gameplay (the bananas and airbag mines were literally the same thing). We even had to ship the VR part of the game after launch, which was not what we promised.
One of the most horrible things that happened was that one popular streamer tried to play the game on launch day - but we had a crash bug which happened if you had a controller connected(!!) when booting up the game!
Silver linings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne7-dbYjSEE
What I was immensely proud of was the storyline and humor, which I think we nailed - there were some cringy stuff we had to cut at the end, but the final version of the game at least has a fun spy story with some edge to it! The levels were also nice and varied, even though we could have used a few more different enemy types and more innovative use of the shrink ray. And the speed which we shipped this with, doing the entire game project basically from start to inevitable finish in just 8 months.
Many things can be said about The Spy Who Shrunk Me. The fact it got the reception it did really humbled us. It was too ambitious, too big of a scope and definitely a bit rushed out of the door. If you enjoyed the experience despite all the jank, you got to see what we did best - games that made you think "what the hell are we playing right now".
I've since tried to keep the game nice and discounted so it at least won't break your bank. I really hope you enjoyed your time with it.
Five years later
We took the death of Catland pretty hard, but all of us stuck to the gaming industry. I started a new company called Makea Games, of which I'm the CEO, Founder & Creative Director of. For The Spy Who Shrunk Me, I did marketing art, the entire UI, wrote and scripted the cutscenes and story, made the initial prototype and came up with all the gameplay features.
Arttu, the level designer, went on to work for 10tons, another Tampere-based game company (of Crimsonland fame), as a lead level designer for their open-world game Dysmantle.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/846770/DYSMANTLE/
Anssi, one of the founders and programmers, went to work on games like Surviving the Aftermath from Iceflake Studios and other projects, and is now founding a new game company!
Tommi, the other founder and programmer, went onto Iceflake Studios as well to work on Surviving the Aftermath and other cool titles.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/684450/Surviving_the_Aftermath/
Mikko, the programmer working on the VR version, went onto work at Cosmic Lounge.
Many of the rest of the development team moved onto my next venture. Out of the team, Ville (programmer at Catland, now CTO at Makea Games), Bea (environment artist at Catland, now founder at Makea Games) and Pyry (voice actor for all the guards, now game designer at Makea Games) joined me at Makea Games.
If you're interested in what we're working on - we are making the ultimate parkour party game called Supermoves! You can check out some of the revealed stuff at supermovesgame.com. Put it this way; if you like Tony Hawk's, Mirror's Edge, Fall Guys and Minecraft - boy do we have a game for you.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1959580/Supermoves/
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there going to be a sequel/prequel/any followup for The Spy Who Shrunk Me?
Nope, never. We never really made a buck on the game, and while ambitious, we really couldn't make the concept work as we wanted. Better it serve as a shrine for future games of the same type - maybe one day some other team can tackle a NOLF-like stealth game!
Are you ever going to update or bugfix The Spy Who Shrunk Me?
I'm way too busy with my new company to do that, unfortunately. The game also didn't make enough money to justify any kind of remaster or remake. I'll keep it as-is, as a rough cut, an unpolished gem. I'm also not a programmer, so I can't really go around fixing stuff.
Could you release the source code for The Spy Who Shrunk Me?
While technically I have the rights, the game uses a lot of proprietary Unity assets (i.e. the office level props, AURA volumetric lighting, etc.) that have a copyright on them. I'm not legally allowed to distribute the contents of the source archive, even though I have it in my possession, due to the use of these proprietary assets.
Will The Spy Who Shrunk Me stay on Steam?
Yes, as long as I am able to host it somewhere. I've been using my friend's company Adjective Animal for the games - the sales go directly to funding the upkeep of stuff like accounting and business costs. I might make my own holding company someday to host it, it's no biggie.
Check out Adjective Animal's games (like the Smash-like topdown hockey game Puck Buddies) here.
Is there an archive of the cutscenes of the game?
Yes! They are properly captioned and everything on YouTube, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNtmBnzYjSw&list=PLcDyWgxSKzuv2o-qsDdYhe1wtTyyMrRkr
What's up with that one ending where the town of Forssa, Finland gets nuked?
I really, really hated the town of Forssa and everyone in it. I lived there for about seven years - seven was too many. Maybe it has changed in the past few years, I don't know, but I wanted to make fun of it in every Catland game. All the taverns in Taphouse VR are based on actual bars in that town, by the way. It was a good in-joke, I hope someone gets it. Our programmer Anssi wanted to add that "Forssa is a magical place."
Can I use the music in the soundtrack in my videos or streaming content?
By all means! Please credit the composer Oskar Nieminen.
Whatever happened to Starship Saboteur?
It didn't get funded. It was a neat concept though and I really learned a lot from it.
Will Catland ever make a return?
It was my first company and will always be in my heart. That logo I made in 3 minutes (and which required 3 hours to have the eye blink using CSS) is still the best damn logo I ever made. Maybe I'll keep hiding the logo around in my future endeavors to keep the spirit of Catland alive. But no, as a company and a studio, we've all drifted apart to our own ventures - we do keep a DIscord server up for catching up from time to time :) We used to have a saying; "from this poker table, we leave as friends". I hope people remember Catland fondly and give it the love it deserves. That's what we all want. Avenge us! ːsporobarː
What's next?
I'll keep the games nice and tidy in the Steam store so people can play them. Feel free to keep on playing The Spy Who Shrunk Me, grab a copy for your friends. I will keep doing discounts and general maintenance. If you really enjoyed the game and want more from the developers, I'll have some news about my next game soon as a separate announcement.
I can't really say how thankful for I am for all the players who've enjoyed The Spy Who Shrunk Me all these years. Thank you so much for having fun with the game! I wish all the best to you.
Tomi Toikka
Former CEO
Catland
