Hello everyone! Another two weeks (and a bit) in the books, and we are releasing our next major patch: Release Candidate 2 (RC2). So what’s been going on in the world of Cat Secretary?
What have we done for RC2?
As will often be the case, there are a ton of small additions and fixes throughout this build. We have changed the look of many floors throughout the game to help each zone feel more unique, some newer quest logic bugs for Goober Glow Up, visual updates with our tutorial cards to match the current look of the game world and its NPCs, more fixes in the ongoing struggle to get gamepad to work with every menu in the game, a bunch of new Sfx for materials and actors in the game n (we have all of our main quest VO mastered, and we almost have all of it in the game now, but that will have to wait for the next release). Interview With a Bot's Chip Replacement minigame has had a refactor, and is a different minigame (go play it and check it out!). The polish tasks and bug fixes are non-stop, but for each release, we are knocking out a ton of improvements.
Headline Updates
Roach Commander and QTE Battle
These are two of our major gameplay setpieces, and both had a TON of work done this past build. In regard to Roach Commander, we completely changed how the game worked. With game design, a phrase often thrown around is “Find the fun”, and that was becoming difficult with our previous iteration of Roach Commander. However, the new change we are in the middle of working on has already made a huge difference in the Fun Factor, and we are really excited to show you all what it looks like when it's done!
QTE Battle received a ton of art polish: our animations and our 2D art for this set piece are in and look great
Fixed a game crash that triggered after completing the game
Completed all gameplay and art asks for the first battle of QTE
Roach Commander has evolved into a light turn-based strategy game
While only in its most basic implementation at this point, this will eventually use a similar advantage system to Fire Emblem. This new version of Roach Commander has three classes for the Roaches, and is already fun to mess with in its early transformation from the previous “reverse” tower defense mini-game.
Day Job Improvements
While on the lighter side this release, due to the needs of our Demo and Trailer, we did have a bunch of polish and fixes for the day job side of things. Part of this is working towards making the day job tasks easier to comprehend for the player right away, and many of these updates will become more evident in the next couple of builds as we implement more of these UI/Tutorial updates. But for this release:
We have added a bunch of new floors and wallpapers for lobby customization; they are not hooked up in-game yet, but you can expect them to be added in the next week.
Added more animation effort to the vending machine mini-game
In the lobby management computer, the player is now aware of what they need to unlock different purchasable assets (ie: what access Lvl or Lobby Rank is required)
Some bug fixes regarding controller logic with different menus of Day Job
And we have concepted out a new mini-game for day job!
Steam Demo and Trailer
As we are nearing release, one of our biggest goals has been to make sure we have a playable demo on Steam before we are ready to share this game with the world; this meant we wanted a demo to be ready for Steam NextFest in June! As of now, our only players have been internal testers and people who have been able to play the game at Conventions, and this push was to make sure we have something playable for anyone interested in the game to be able to try it ahead of time. Along with that, we are having a professional trailer made for the game by an external Trailer House, and we worked on a lot of disparate elements of the game to make sure some of our memorable moments and characters will be shown in the trailer!
For the Steam Demo:
We put in gates for the demo scope of the game
We limit players on how far they can go into Dox, as well as how deep they can go in systems like Lobby upgrades and Staff Morale.
And we have separate builds in Steam for Demo players vs the full game that we have been using for playtesting
We are about to start testing our demo to see how it runs separately from the main game build in Steam!
For the trailer:
With our newer floors in different zones, we updated our stairwells and other materials to better match the new look of the business biome and more
A bunch of our cinematics have been revamped and fleshed out, especially regarding the Roaches (the new ForeRoach intro is excellent!)
Added a new Error face for Obbo to make their emotes more expressive during the prologue
Removed and updated all of our placeholder audio remaining in the game
Had another lighting pass on many of the levels to create a more atmospheric feel to night shift exploration
A lot was done for this release, but much of it was work in preparation for big changes down the road, so players may only notice some of the work that went on these past two weeks. As always, let us know if you run into anything on your playthroughs!!