Happy 1-Year Anniversary to Beef Cat Ultra!
Beef Cat Ultra released last year on September 23rd 2024. And it has been an excellent year. Out of the gate Beef Cat Ultra reached a smaller audience than we anticipated - such is game development. But we did a handful of polish patches and released the large Remix update for Steam users adding endless endgame content for diehard players.
In late December I cold-emailed an indie game publisher and said "hey I think you should publish my game for consoles" but in a slightly more professional way. And when I woke up the next morning I was surprised to see a return email from them saying "we agree, let's talk" exactly as casually as that. A few short months later, Beef Cat Ultra released for the Nintendo Switch consoles, Playstation 4/5, and Xbox One and Series consoles.
In the months since, we've been quiet on Beef Cat Ultra while we worked on other projects and tried some new things out. But I've been logging every bit of feedback for the game across all platforms and finished a gargantuan Anniversary Patch late last week. This was a holistic look at every thing in the game. Stage design, assets, code - anything that could be looked at was looked at. And a LOT was tweaked.
Let's get into some monster patch notes:
Beef Cat Ultra v2.0 Patch Notes
Early Game Balancing and Onboarding
Beef Cat Survives: Removed a chest from near the starting point, replaced some trees with grassy fenced areas.
Gauntlet Legacy: Moved the first gate closer to the start of the stage so that is shares a screen with the first key, moved a couple early stage enemy spawners, added a bridge over the large body of water to give players another path in a congested space.
Collectathon: Added extra gemmies to the stage, only requires about 90% of gems for stage clear.
Funky Lake Stages: visual improvements to create more landmark type spaces in the environment to help with understanding the layout better.
Broken Forest: changed player starting location, added gemmies, only requires about 90% of gems for stage clear, added an additional path to prevent players getting trapped in the late stage congestion.
General Balancing
Beef Cat base HP 10 -> 12
iFrames 10 -> 12
Froggie base HP 15 -> 18
Badish HP 10 -> 7
Fox HP 6 -> 4
Artibloke HP 20 -> 14
Big Boss Badish HP 500 -> 400
Friend Monster HP 650 -> 450
Added new pickups to all 3 main Metal Mountain stages
All shops base cost adjusted and cost curve reduced
Visual Changes
A new title screen!
World Map has less tile bloat which makes the room instance less of a load on the engine
Tile tweaks to every single stage to increase visual variety
World region text pop up text smaller and color change, added drop shadow, to improve legibility
Quality of Life Changes
Added a kill counter to Survive stages that had Steam Achievements tied to a specific kill count
Pressing Tab (Select on a controller) while in a stage opens audio settings
Trap signs now spawn world appropriate enemies
Itemizing out the little changes to every single stage would make this a sprawling changelog that I do not want to type. So, please enjoy that being reduced to "tweaks to every single stage" for my sanity.
As long as new players are finding Beef Cat Ultra, I'll keep tweaking and improving it. Even as we prepare to launch the Steam page for our next project (the page is currently under review and I was hoping it would be live in time for this update but oh well). If you've played the game, leave a review - it helps us! If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend. Help us make more games by supporting us! We appreciate everyone a ton - whether you hopped in totally in the dark or are a good friend who picked up a copy.
Thank you,
Kyle