Hey everyone!
I’m realising it’s been around 3 years since I started working on Matt’s Hidden Cats – which is how long the original version of Epic Battle Fantasy 5 took to make, and that’s my best game by far!
So you may be wondering why a seemingly simpler project is taking so long…?
Well, I also need to answer this for myself to regain some sanity.
So here’s some reasons…
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First of all, it’s not the only thing I’ve been working on. In this time I also ported Epic Battle Fantasy 4 to Android and updated the Windows version (sorry, iOS fans). I’ve been supporting the EBF5 modding community and fan-made Chinese translations for my older games. And I’ve been doing general maintenance, promotions, and customer support for my existing games, which are still selling well.
Secondly, I’m not working full time anymore! I have more hobbies now. I’m travelling more. I’m playing more video games. I’m spending more time with friends and family. All of that makes me feel like I’m not being as productive as I used to be, but I certainly am – it’s just that I’m producing personal experiences rather than content for the web. Though there is also a lot of procrastination in there that I could cut out.
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In addition to spending less time working on game development, the scope of Matt’s Hidden Cats has also massively increased over time, for a few reasons…
There’s a LOT of hidden object games out there, and while many of them are very short and simple (or otherwise not very good), some of them are fantastic. Hidden Folks, Hidden Through Time, and the upcoming Lost and Found Co are amazing games, and I want to make sure that Matt’s Hidden Cats is at least as good as any of them.
And after seeing the success of EBF5 – a game that is still selling 7 years after its release – I want to continue making games that have long-lasting appeal. I don’t want to make games that go out of fashion or feel outdated eventually. I want Matt’s Hidden Cats to be a game that will still be good, relative to the competition, 10 years from now.
And what that means is that it has to have a TON of content, secrets, lore, and re-playability, as well as being polished and easy to get into for new players.
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Another big challenge is that it’s by far the biggest project I’ve worked on from scratch. All my other big projects were sequels to smaller games that already nailed down a lot of the mechanics, and a lot of the code and assets could be reused. In Matt’s Hidden Cats, I’m solving an unusually large number of design problems for the first time, and in some cases I’m re-making mechanics and user interface elements that I wasn’t very happy with. Sometimes I’ll code something that just doesn’t feel good, and never sees the light of day – where as with my older games, it was very rare for me to spend time on cut content.
This also makes technical challenges more difficult, as features that I assumed would be trivial can end up being very complicated, simply because I didn’t have the experience to know that in advance. A big pain for me has been learning about how graphics are transformed – working with transform matrices, how to check if an object is mirrored or not, converting one coordinate space into another, programming motion tweens, etc – it’s all very confusing for me and I don’t have a good intuition for it. But it turned out to be very important for the features that I wanted, like being able to arbitrarily attach objects to other objects in my level editor – so that you can make a horse wear a hat, or stick an arrow in its butt.
Sometimes these challenges are the right level of difficulty and end up being fun, but sometimes it’s nothing but math, which I don’t like at all.
Another example is context-aware hit-boxes. All the interactive objects in the game have pixel-perfect click detection by default, but objects of interest – goals, keys, movable obstacles, etc – have larger hitboxes to make gameplay smoother (especially useful if the game eventually gets a mobile port). This seemingly simple feature requires a lot of logic to make sure that the larger hitboxes are only active at the correct time. A lot of work is going into stuff that most players won’t even notice!
I suppose modern game engines handle some of this kind of stuff for you, but I’m still using Flash.
Oh well… at least I’ll have experience with features that may be useful in future projects, or maybe I’ll just know what to avoid programming again.
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Related to the previous section, I wrongly estimated how long content would take to create. I originally assumed that creating graphics assets would be the most time consuming (but also the most fun) part of this project. I thought that once the graphics were done, designing levels would be fairly quick – and in the beginning it was!
But as the number of assets and special interactions in the game grew, the complexity of each level increased. It took longer to pick out the right assets for each level. It took longer to hide objects behind other objects, behind destructible walls, behind movable carts, and so on. All of that required more planning, and as more levels were made, I had the additional task of trying to make sure that each level was distinct from every other level, so as to not feel repetitive.
And the amount of collectables in each level increased! First there was only one set of goals, then there were 3 separate sets of goals for each difficulty setting, then there were gems to find that could be used as currency, and then there were pieces of art to fill out the gallery. So I had to go back and update levels I had made earlier.
I also… probably made too many art assets, and then had to make enough levels to justify their existence. The game is going to be fairly long to complete to 100%, that’s for sure.
No one (sensible) is gonna be complaining that it’s too short.
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I originally didn’t want the game to have any story at all – or any human characters – but I figured that would be wasting an opportunity to get the existing EBF fans interested in this project, and also try out some new storytelling techniques.
On Twitter I tested out some mock-up dialogue screenshots featuring the EBF cast, and they were super popular (some of my most popular Tweets ever). So I programmed a dialogue system with very expressive character models and special text formatting, and tested out some dialogue segments in the form of YouTube videos. And that was also received very well, with some of the videos getting over 30,000 views – which is a lot for my little channel, and a lot for indie game promotional videos. And finally, the updated designs of the characters have received a lot of fan-art already.
So it was quickly settled that Matt’s Hidden Cats needed a fun story related to the lore of the EBF universe in order to multiply sales. I’m having fun with it so I’m not complaining, but it’s certainly adding to the development time. I don’t think I’ve mentioned all of it yet, but there’s gonna be some fun interactivity in the cutscenes. You can enter names, branch dialogue based on how you answer questions, and maybe other fun stuff…
And if you’re reading this and still don’t know… the story of Matt’s Hidden Cats is about the EBF crew forming a game development studio, creating this game, and getting you to test it. It’s both a continuation of where the EBF5 story ended, but also an alternative universe where things are somewhat more realistic.
You can interpret it as you like – all the other games’ plots are only loosely connected anyway.
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While Matt’s Hidden Cats is a Flash game, it’s being programmed to run in a Flashplayer emulator called Ruffle. Ruffle has plenty of advantages over the traditional player, including performance enhancements that allow the game to handle way more animations at once. But Ruffle is a work-in-progress, so it’s still got some quirks here and there, and using it to publish games for Steam and other platforms is mostly uncharted waters.
I’m keeping a close eye on the Ruffle Discord to see what sort of features people manage to hack together on it, and I’m also contributing by hunting down some bugs occasionally, as well as being a sponsor of Ruffle’s development.
This stuff is important because I hope to also port my older Steam games to Ruffle, so that they run smoother. And if things go well, I’ll continue using it for future games.
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In addition to just making an all-round great game, I keep coming up with fun ideas that I want to try out. Stuff that can give the game a bit more depth and re-playability. Stuff that might be fun to code.
This includes unlockable cursors that grant abilities – the pencil can draw, the gun can… do something. These basically amount to minigames that can be played in any level. Totally silly and optional, but could add hours of play time to those who enjoy them.
I also want to add some shader options in order to play around with the art style, but this also adds potential for a user-defined difficulty setting – black and white mode, Game Boy style, pixelated graphics, whatever. This can make the game harder, or interesting to replay. I’m not sure how it will turn out, but I think it’ll be pretty fun if I get it working.
Features like these may also be useful to add to my other games. The ability to draw on the map is something that people wanted in EBF, for example. So now I’ve got the code for that and could potentially copy it over at some point. And the shaders could be great for the retro-themed areas in EBF5.
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Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say.
The game is taking way longer than it was supposed to, but mostly for good reasons.
It’s definitely not a simple project to test out Ruffle any more.
I wanted to launch it by the end of this year, but that’s starting to look unlikely now, and early 2026 seems like a better plan. I’ll grind away at it over the next few months and pull all the pieces together, so you guys will have something to test, and I can collect some feedback.