FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD44 → Collecting Really Nice Cats!

Collecting Really Nice Cats!

By cheesepencil

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2033.44107
Fun1013.59107
Innovation2253.15102
Theme4422.67101
Graphics3113.16105
Audio603.69105
Humor34.36106
Mood1873.26100

Comments

deathbysnail 2019-04-29 12:30

This had me giggling throughout. I love all the sounds - the intro, the cat variations, the grunting jump sound.

I also thought it is great that it bleeds to red. Why? Because you don't collect ALL the cats. Awesome.

daria-toni 2019-04-29 13:09

Well, that was a bit crazy :) Sounds very creatively made and... you know... CATS! Nothing about cats can be a bad thing :)

fnkee 2019-04-29 23:34

Lol, the sound effects in this are amazing. And making the decision that cats should fly in the wrong direction when kids run over you: pure evil. Great job on this!

neonjeff 2019-04-29 23:56

hahaha. Well done! A true cat lady experience. Everything that is in there is really solidly done.

donitz 2019-04-29 23:58

Did you seriously hire professional VAs for this game? Cheating!

nathaniel-jensen 2019-04-30 00:01

This was awesome! The sounds are the best! I was not disappointed at all with the ending.

akshay-b 2019-04-30 00:04

A ridiculous game I thoroughly enjoyed. I liked the sound design, and bonus points for the exhaustion I could hear in your voice for the "Hooray you did it!" line lol. Well done!

emmy 2019-04-30 00:32

Funny and fun! I really like the graphics, sound effects, and throwing cats. Good job!

highlandbert 2019-04-30 00:33

Ok it took me four tries but I did it haha. It's a really fun game and the sound effects are amazing! Good job 👏

cheesepencil 2019-04-30 01:19

@highlandbert You beat the odds, lol! I read somewhere LD reviewers play a game for an average of two minutes so that's what I set the timer for

omnipotentindie 2019-04-30 01:36

Funny idea, controls were annoying but I think that added to it in kind of a surgeon simulator way. Always love a game with these sound effects

tater-hater 2019-04-30 01:51

Def giving a 5 for theme lol

cheesepencil 2019-04-30 02:04

@tater-hater thanks tater u da man

kuviman 2019-04-30 02:13

Nice voice acting :)

dan-thompson 2019-04-30 02:35

While I thought the theme was a little bit of a stretch, I thought your game was very fun and it had me giggling the whole time. I failed the first time but I was like "I know I can do it!" and got all the cats on the second try.

calzep 2019-04-30 02:40

WEIRD! I like it. It's like a novelty item. *Old lady grunt*

khaoz-fang 2019-04-30 06:12

meoooow:)

grllle 2019-04-30 09:17

Nominated for winner in the category Humor. I had my share of laughs! Thanks.

naruvan 2019-04-30 13:09

The word play on theme is amazing! And I love this kind of sound effects :) Meow MEOOOOW Meow MEOOOOOW

barrier 2019-04-30 13:23

Amazing sounds! Not sure if it fits the theme?

rustycrow 2019-05-01 15:56

Damn kids, :baby: :gun: :older_woman: GET OF ME LAWN!!. The sound effect rally made this a funny game to play. My only problem is why use the 1 key you cant spam to pick up the cats :frog: :gun: , damn sticky keys been blocking players since 1995 dude.

cheesepencil 2019-05-01 16:16

@rustycrow lol sorry about that, the library i used has a shortcut to assign keyboard input defaults (arrow keys + space + shift) and I wanted to program the game and not the controls! thanks for playing!

tamail 2019-05-01 16:56

Is this a game about my future? :D Loved the sounds, graphics, gameplay, everything!

pcmaster 2019-05-01 17:45

I LOL'd hard, you did a very good choice to record the sounds yourself for this one! Feel free to check out my previous game about keeping kittens off your property :D And also my current game.

paul59 2019-05-01 18:32

That was a giggle! Nicely tuned mechanics, fitting graphics, hilarious 'sound effects'. Great. Maybe you should have called it Catapult though!? :D

orangejuicepanda 2019-05-02 01:55

Hilarious audio and really funny tone. Wish the jump was a little higher and wish I could change speed/direction when jumping. That being said though I had a lot of fun with this game. Nice work.

cheesepencil 2019-05-02 02:28

@orangejuicepanda thank you for playing! The lack of air control was intentional - I didn't want it to be TOO easy... Hopefully it was challenging enough to bamboozle you on the first try but not so annoying you gave up before you beat it!

ransom 2019-05-02 05:19

Funny! I had trouble clearing the kids a lot of the time, although that kinda added to the humour — especially when it sent a cat flying in an unpredictable direction. With some greater variety to the environment and hazards, this could be keep someone entertained for a while. Nice work.

cheesepencil 2019-05-02 12:15

@ransom I had planned for a whole procedurally generated trailer park full of unique baddies... On Sunday afternoon it really hit home I could only implement a tiny fraction of my grand vision :cry: thank you for playing

nate-prince 2019-05-02 15:01

Grate game loved all the sound effects and was very addictive

vectrex28 2019-05-02 17:39

Meow? MEOOOOOOW! I just played that lootbox memegame and I thought I found the winner in the humour cat-egory. Turns out I was wrong. Not only is it fun to play, but the graphics and the sound, as well as the take on the theme are all top notch. Best game I played so far for this LD. Major kudos to the creator

vectrex28 2019-05-02 17:40

Also please, PLEASE continue making updates for this game I'd totally buy a fully-featured version

cheesepencil 2019-05-02 18:06

@vectrex28 Thank you so much for the feedback! lol you'll be the first to know if I ever work on it again :laughing:

lmb 2019-05-02 22:17

Bas-cat-ball :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I considered a time or two to do what you did with the audio, but I didn't had the boldness to proceed. Worked well :slight_smile:

tiago-r-epaminondas 2019-05-02 22:27

Love this dumb cat game <3, the sounds are awesome, it's pretty funny and it's just really cool (also like the idea of the hole and tossing cats to the top of the trailer), the only thing is that it doesn't fit as well with the theme of the jam.

cheesepencil 2019-05-02 22:38

@lmb Opting out of a ratings category is not an option!!!

furtive-pygmy 2019-05-02 23:29

Haha! You crushed the sound effects, great job! Other than the flat black background the art and character animation is great. A bit of music would have been good to bounce along with. Nails the theme of collecting really nice cats! (Probably not the LD one, but boo to that!).

I had way too much fun playing cat basketball, keep it up and hope to see you next time.

cheesepencil 2019-05-02 23:35

@furtive-pygmy I'm gonna knock it outta the park in October, you'll see :wink:

shaolin-dave 2019-05-03 04:22

Okay, graphics were great, the sounds had me laughing out loud! I like how you completely abandoned the theme while still referencing it. I really enjoyed the game, maybe because I'm a dog person.

Most games use WASD to move, so switching over to arrow keys was a little inconvenient. I suggest sticking to conventions, or allowing players to use either.

I do think I found a glitch, if you press both the jump and throw button in midair, you do a double-jump. I don't think there's much to exploit there, though.

squirmonkey 2019-05-03 04:45

I lol'd, and something makes me think that's what you were going for.

cheesepencil 2019-05-03 04:59

@shaolin-dave *always* setup arrows because every keyboard has arrow keys but not everyone has a QWERTY layout. I won't force international users to change their system keyboard mappings to accommodate WASD. That way everybody is inconvenienced equally! I would have mirrored directional controls to WASD as a courtesy to QWERTY keyboard users, but, you know... 48 hours...

I'll write some boilerplate before LD45 for remapping input/pausing/sound options so those quality of life features don't eat into my compo time.

Regarding the glitch: if you quickly, repeatedly alternate hurling a cat and jumping you basically have semi controllable flight... Will leave the antigravity cat hurling bug unpatched as reward to folks like you who go the extra mile. Consider it an unintentional easter egg! Thanks for playing!

no-grapes-games 2019-05-03 08:42

I think I enjoyed this more than I should have. It was funny and felt good to play. The controls worked very well and throwing the cats was satisfying. It didn't go with the theme at all but I really did enjoy the game and it's humor. Great job!

tricky-fat-cat 2019-05-03 19:45

1. The best opening! 2. The best sounds!

captaindreamcast 2019-05-03 20:14

Yayy, yayyy, I did it, yayy!

Hilarious game, the sound effects and voice clips had me in stitches. Loved it.

michael-feldman 2019-05-03 21:58

Sound effects are effective imprompty and humorous. The mechanics are simple and also hilarious. The cat throw is a simple mechanic at the surface, but I do wonder how one could develop it further... The web build is great, and the controls were easy to pick up. Gotta appreciate a great delivery.

kaeveris 2019-05-04 05:17

Very cool idea and fun atmosphere! What a bad kid and poor Gertrude. The sounds were amazing!

craftlord 2019-05-04 10:06

lol :-) Fun little game. The first time I was at a loss, where to put the cats?

Read the description better, and the second time around I got all the cats in!

nikolay-zapolnov 2019-05-04 20:11

I am in total love with the sound effects! Also gameplay is nice and addictive. Great job!

ursagames 2019-05-04 20:12

Thank you for submitting your game to be played on my stream!

Once the stream is finished you can find the video here: https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos If you want to know when it was played you can find your game in the queue here: https://tinyurl.com/y5rdokvp

duke 2019-05-04 21:58

Sounds like you had fun recording all sounds for all the characters ;) The gameplay is simple enough but there seems to be an issue with the collected cats counter. It stayed at 0 even though i've thrown a lot of cats into the trailer through the roof like the description suggested. Seems like I'm the only one with the problem since no one in the comments mentioned it. Well, no harm done. The art is adequate and some music would've been nice. The controls were a bit clunky. Jumping and picking up cats didn't always work direclty. All in all, a fun little game!

cheesepencil 2019-05-04 23:01

@duke I'm sorry you ran into bugs... I knew they were there, somewhere, hiding, biding their time... and I regret they chose to expose themselves you! If you have a moment and don't mind sharing, can you tell me which operating system, browser (and browser version, if possible), and what kind of computer you used to play it? Had you already played a round and won/lost before the counter broke or did it start broken? Did you play in full screen or in the itch.io frame?

Also I realize you have thousands of games to play yet so I completely understand if y'ain't got time to respond.

**also thank you for playing!!!**

miu 2019-05-04 23:49

Me and my teammate had a great time playing it thanks for making it :)

kimily 2019-05-05 03:53

The voice acting was hilarious! Easily the best part of this game was the dude saying "MEOW?!" when you pick him up like "Excuse me?" Needs some background music :D

duke 2019-05-05 08:11

@cheesepencil Sure, no problem. I played your game on a Windows 10 machine. I tried the current Chrome and the current Firefox, in which I had the same counting problem. All sessions I played had the broken counter, so from the very first playthrough until jest recently. The strange thing is, that sometimes, the counter updates correctly and then goes back to 0, for example when I toggle the fullscreen mode in chrome. It's really curious. I Hope you can work with that. Cheers!

xeke-death 2019-05-05 11:52

MEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

For a simple little game, this was stupidly fun. Good work. I found out that the kids were exploitable, using them to toss the cats further than I could myself, and had them do some of the work for me.

10/10 audio. Great work.

evgeniya-zapolnova 2019-05-05 15:29

Totally fits the theme!! Sounds are the best ever!!!! I had a lot of fun

cheesepencil 2019-05-05 18:08

@xeke-death Haha I didn't have time to optimize the little-kid-old-lady-smacking physics, ideally the cat would be flung the opposite direction of trailer regardless of the direction you were facing... I am glad you had stupid fun! Thank you for playing!

luckyfeathers 2019-05-05 21:48

Well, that was something! I've got to say, you made me laugh quite a lot at the beginning there! Good job! :D

In terms of gameplay, the only thing I find a bit annoying is that if the kids jump there's literally nothing I can do to dodge them. I wish both I and they jumped higher (and faster), and that I could go below them if they jumped.

And one minor thing. On the UI, the score and timer should be space-consistent. If I have 9/20 cats it should say 09/20 instead, so that it doesn't shift when I get 10. The same with the timer. It's not a big thing, but it can be annoying in other games where you have a fast timer. You can do this in C# by doing catsCollected.toString("D2") instead of just catsCollected.toString().

Anyway, funny entry :) Good job, and good luck next game jam!

jeremy-ryan 2019-05-05 21:53

Audio is top notch. Narrative is deeply engaging. I sympathize strongly with the need to hurl cats at high speeds into their enclosure while avoiding small children in hats.

snowschu 2019-05-05 22:46

LOL! This game was so goofy. SFX/VO was great. I had some goofy bug where the game would just end and say "You Win" before I had enough cats collected. Overall, pretty funny. <3

Here's the [link to the stream](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/420903849) as well. Your game should start around [03:26:00].

cheesepencil 2019-05-05 23:38

@luckyfeathers **Thanks for playing!** There's a metric butt-ton of quality of life stuff like that I just didn't have time to get cleaned up. At the end of sunday I had just barely got cat-hurling functionality working consistently and as you might guess I had to half-butt everything else in the last hours before compo deadline.

This was written with TypeScript, BTW

cheesepencil 2019-05-05 23:45

@snowschu **Thank you for playing!!!** You are the second streamer to run into this bug! I wish I knew how to resolve it but I'm totally baffled. Hopefully it didn't detract too much from the experience.

madjackmcmad 2019-05-06 01:49

Great stuff, many props for excellent cat sound effects and clearly a 5-star theme effort for matching both the phonetic truth and certain intent of the theme. Well done for reals.

raymoclaus 2019-05-06 03:28

Hi, cheese. You told me you couldn't run executable files, so I've added a web version of my game.

jordantanner 2019-05-06 08:42

@cheesepencil Nice chatting/interacting with you on stream earlier today! Loved the funny sound effects and the mechanics worked pretty well too. Thanks man!

cheesepencil 2019-05-06 12:27

@raymoclaus thanks buddy I'll check it out on my lunch break!

solah 2019-05-06 19:27

It's funny but the child is really too frastrating.

Loved the main joke and the sound design x), good job!

t-bo 2019-05-08 16:15

Nice work on sound ! It's really fun to catch and throw the cats ! But I think that the little boy is a little bit too violent ! Great work ! :clap:

cheesepencil 2019-05-08 18:51

@t-bo Kids these days are so violent because of the vidya!!

euler-moises 2019-05-09 02:29

Congratulations for the game. New stages to come?

Try, rate and comment on our game too, please.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/junkebox-panic

cheesepencil 2019-05-09 12:00

@euler-moises done! Rated yours (did you recently add a web build?)

Sadly CRNC will not receive updates or fixes or new levels... But I'll definitely jam again with hopefully a more robust entry

euler-moises 2019-05-09 13:10

@cheesepencil Thank you! The web version was available right from the start! Too bad there will be no new versions. Other phases and other difficulties would be interesting.

Hugs

joemanaco 2019-05-09 18:01

:cat2: :kissing_cat:

extrone 2019-05-09 18:26

That was a fun,ny game :joy:

doubleblackstudios 2019-05-10 03:48

The pun was the best part!

zoneoutapps 2019-05-10 05:41

Superb! Human sound efx were the best!! :D

very-dark-lord 2019-05-10 10:44

Apart from the game being funny, with lovely audio, a generally great premise and a lot of creative freedom with how you interpreted the theme, I especially like how this game has a really narrow set of mechanics and still manages to be complex enough for the player to develop different "strategies", or at least learn something new after one or two playthroughs. Despite its simplicity I "discovered" several things while playing, namely that you can drop the cats or throw them in from a distance, that there are *two* sides to your trailer (this one was important), and that it's a good idea to throw cats away before the children hit you. Also it may be a good idea to spend some time away and just throw cats in the general right direction before returning to your trailer yourself. It's like the balance between the game's simplicity and its implications on how to play the game is just right. Also it required basically zero explanation of how to play which is always a plus.

The only "complaints" I'd state are that 1) I think it's too difficult to evade the children, felt almost impossible most of the time, and 2) a background would have been nice, this black void is a little sad to look at. :D Great job though, well done!

cheesepencil 2019-05-10 12:19

@very-dark-lord thank you for taking the time to write an analysis with more depth than the game itself :laughing:

All your points are valid. I had to make some things a little unfair (like not being able to avoid the child when he randomly jumps, like disabling air control on Gertrude's jumps, like the not so obvious west side of the trailer) to get difficulty in that sweet spot where a casual-to-experienced player would almost definitely fail their first attempt but almost definitely succeed in the second or third.

I really wish I had time for music and background art, but that 48 hour time limit is brutal! As you might imagine sounds and UI were done in the last hour before the compo deadline...

Thank you for playing and for the kind words

webox 2019-05-10 16:29

Top notch sound, best of the best. Great job haha, had a really fun time with it. Congrats on yor game!

dock-frankenstein 2019-05-10 18:39

Collected very nice cats!

gurkenlabs 2019-05-10 22:00

I like the amount of nice cats contained in this game. The mechanics were simplistic but fun, the visuals appealing, and the sounds hilarious!

kuro 2019-05-11 08:52

See, I didn't play your game yet, and I can't since I'm on a phone, but you get 5* for theme from me, here and now, for your description.

cheesepencil 2019-05-11 12:50

@kuro I hope you come back and give it a try when you're on a device with a physical keyboard!

firesplash-entertainment 2019-05-15 18:27

Thanks for submitting we just played the game on our P&R stream!

syrapt0r 2019-05-15 22:26

Hey there :smile: I played your game live today, you can find the video here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/425268176?t=00h09m18s

Best voice acting I have heard this jam :D

shunaky 2019-05-15 22:49

I see this as myself in the future... The crazy cat sir hahaha

foumart 2019-05-15 22:58

Had a lot of fun with this game :) Found a strategy to go to the edge and spam the Shift key while running towards the trailer.. Gertrude was quite skillful in throwing all the cats. At some point my Win OS started warning me about Sticky Keys, so I went to disable that at Settings/Keyboard/Allow the shortcut key to start Sticky Keys - turned it off. Really liked the sounds and especially the different variations of Meow :)

cheesepencil 2019-05-16 00:29

@syrapt0r Thanks for playing my game on stream! Looks like I had already played and rated Gerydas Tower, and now that I think about it, I believe it was one of the first games I played on the first day that ratings opened!

pequenodev 2019-05-16 00:57

Epic sounds and mood. I did 19/20 two times, (damn kids, im gonna say their parents!) Hehehe, great job mate, it was funny.

coda-highland 2019-05-18 04:19

I can't blame you for completely dodging the theme. Creative sidestep!

jeroenpx 2019-05-18 16:59

Funny sound effects.

The kids went from really annoying to very useful when I realized you can misuse the kids to throw the cats towards the trailer! Practical! :smiley: (You simply need to look away from the trailer when the kid hits you!)

oivin-f 2019-05-18 17:57

Fun entry, the victory sound effect was a treat.

m2tias 2019-05-21 08:57

5/5 sfx! Player's jump is way too low to get past the kids, so it gets really annoying. Graphics are nice :)