Heya, people.
I think it's time for a status report on Matt's Hidden Cats.
Currently 74 levels for the game are finished, and it's expected to have around 80, maybe a little more.
Once those are done, I need to start working on the menus, story, and lots and lots of polish.
Level design ended up taking a lot longer than I expected, because the levels are more detailed and have more interactive elements than most similar games. Plus there's 3 different difficulty options with different items to find on each, so that adds some development time, but I'm sure it will be worth it as it gives the game a lot of re-playability.
While the game is perfectly playable now, there's still a lot of work to do on improving animations and item interactions even more, and there's also a lot of bugs and optimization issues I've been ignoring for months that I'll have to eventually sort out. And levels I made a long time ago are already a bit out-of-date design-wise, so I'll have to make improvements to "finished" levels too!
To make the game more addictive, there's also gonna be a LOT of collectables, including Monster Cards, fan-art, and skins, and those are only partially implemented at the moment. At any rate, it should be quite a fun and satisfying game to 100% - there's no action elements, so pretty much everyone should be able to complete it all with a reasonable amount of patience. There's a lot of optional hints and settings that can speed things up and allow you to play at a pace that suits you.
I've been chatting with various music artists to figure out what to do for the soundtrack.
I don't think the game will have much custom music - most of it will be already existing music. It doesn't really need an exciting soundtrack in my opinion - it's quite an atmospheric game and I'm more concerned with finding tracks that give a certain vibe for each level and go well with the ambient sound effects, rather than a soundtrack that pops and stands alone like in the EBF games.
Currently, Matt's Hidden Cats has 11,500 wishlists on Steam, which is a decent start, considering that Epic Battle Fantasy 5 had 16,000 at launch. But the fans for that game were much more invested, and I have no delusions that Matt's Hidden Cats will be as popular with the same audience. I'm going to do my best to appeal to EBF fans, but I'll definitely have to branch out and try to find new audiences too. I think Matt's Hidden Cats is a very accessible game that anyone can play, including younger kids and old people, BUT it's also gonna include a bit of edginess and a lot of EBF references for my existing audience.
Anyway, It's hard to say overall how much of the work is finished, but probably around 60%. The game should come out some time in 2025, and closer to release I'll make a demo that shows off a good slice of the game.
