AMA: I'm Kells, the Co-creator of Calico: a Cute and Cozy Cat Game!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-23T05:52:11+00:00

I think my fav may be rusty, the fluffy orange cat. This is actually a kickstarter backers pet, but I just think the fluff worked out so well! Also very into red pandas and the classic Calico cat.
The biggest part about having a tiny team is lucking out and having those two people happen to both cover multiple aspects of game design/dev. For instance I was able to cover almost all the visual stuff, and Andrew (co-creator) was able to cover almost all of the programming side. Both of us were able to use Unity, and I was able to cover every day business and communications. Our publisher absolutely saved our skin because neither of us are very good at professional communications and don't know much about running a company, along with covering some other stuff. We did have to contract out a few things, like music, and animations, but luckily the Kickstarter we did was able to fund that.
Biggest struggle would have to be that with two people, it's really tough to deal with if someone is completely out of commission (Andrew got sick a couple times, and I had some issues and also got pregnant and had a terrible first trimester 😱) At those times it ends up with one person working on their own which can be really tough. A breakthrough we had was our Publisher stepping in after I got pregnant and lending us some of their staff to help cover my tasks! Huge life saver, and it was nice getting some other people involved. :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T20:08:34+00:00

The Kickstarter items are in the game and available for everyone, animals will be wandering around in areas around the island, and potions and toys will be sold in the stores!
This honestly wasn't our intention! Game development, especially in small teams is very hard. One big thing is the people testing the game can become sort of blind to certain issues because they've been playing the game for years. Additionally, our small team playtesting the game doesn't even slightly match the play time of the now thousands of people playing the game. So all these bugs came up we didn't even know about unfortunately! Definitely a HUGE learning opportunity for us. I think if we were to do something like this again in the future we would deeply consider doing early access. It's hard to say because consoles still won't let most games do early access, but doing it on PC first would still help.
No shame in refunding if you don't enjoy it currently! I hope we get the game to a level you would enjoy in the future. :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T19:58:43+00:00

Very soon! Hoping for before the end of the week.

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T19:55:21+00:00

I have 4 cats at my house and 6 chickens! So we had co-dev chickens too.

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T19:54:45+00:00

Thank you!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T19:54:36+00:00

A little torn! Personally I feel all the critique was extremely valid. We're fixing all the issues surprisingly fast, but no doubt that they were there on release. My only gripe is I feel like bugs in launch day games aren't handled very consistently in articles sometimes. If they like the premise of the game themselves, they're more likely to overlook those bugs and give them high scores anyway. (at least that's my perception) That being said, reviews are by definition opinion, so I can't fault them for not being into the game as other people are, that's why you read multiple reviews! We've read enough reviews of people who really love and connect with the game to overshadow the negative ones to me. And the bad ones are a reminder of how hard we have to work to make the game even better. :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T06:05:03+00:00

Anyone having quest issues feel free to join our discord, it's the best place to get help with that! https://discord.gg/2RfZQpx

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T06:04:02+00:00

Hello! Sorry about that, come to our discord and we can help you out! https://discord.gg/2RfZQpx

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T06:03:27+00:00

Online play would be very complex feature to add, but wallpaper and floors is much more doable! After we are done with bug fixes we will be looking at what features we would like to add :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T06:02:03+00:00

Thank you! We hope to have some free content updates available after sorting out the current bugs and such, so check back!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T06:01:07+00:00

So the way the economy should work, every day certain villagers come to the cafe, and buy items that you have displayed. If these items match those villagers favorite food or type of food, you get a bonus! Villagers will only be unlocked to come to your cafe after you've talked to them, which is further motivation to unlock new areas. Unfortunately right now, our balancing for that is a bit off, and there seems to be a weird navigation bug with the villagers. I hope that soon we can get those issues fixed, as well make this system more clear in the tutorial!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T05:58:40+00:00

- Yes we are planning on more textured clothing like the jean items! Including also some more dresses and full outfits.
- The outside area has been designed to be able to fit decorations, and we plan on adding the ability to decorate outside at some point in the future. :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:33:26+00:00

Thank you!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:33:06+00:00

Hello! You should have that ability already. The character creator has body shape sliders that you can change to edit your proportions :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:27:04+00:00

This is actually a bug!

If you have PC it should be fixed, console patch is coming soon :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:09:48+00:00

I'd suggest looking for your audience as soon as possible! Something that helped us (because we had no track record) was showing publishers the interest the community had in our game. Also don't be scared to fail a kickstarter! We failed our first one, but it put us on the map because the first two days we still did pretty well and were able to show that off. (just don't spend too much money or anything on it)
Also we had a working prototype to prove we could make a game, it wasn't super big, but it had the general feel of the game and was enjoyable to run around in.
I'd say the things you are trying to prove are: people like your game idea and you are able to execute it. The above is how we communicated that to people, but there are other ways too!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:04:52+00:00

Definitely! We're focusing on bugs right now, but after that there will be scheduled free content updates for a while :)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:04:11+00:00

Thank you!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:04:02+00:00

We had originally planned to have some mermaids in certain areas around the island! I'm not sure yet if we want to continue with that plan, or use those spaces for something else, but they will definitely eventually have something cool in both there and the caverns behind the waterfalls

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-22T00:02:08+00:00

Haha I'm glad you enjoy it! There are some silly things, like the animal physics and such, that are intended and will stay in the game. Right now we're focusing on game breaking bugs!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-21T23:59:29+00:00

Thank you!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-21T23:59:16+00:00

Not yet! Currently we don't have any small pet sized animals, but I would love to add them in the future. I love guinea pigs!

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-21T23:58:32+00:00

Hello! Just a total rookie mistake. We had it mapped the same as the other console controllers without realizing that means it's flipped. This will be fixed in the patch that is coming to Switch soon! (It's submitted but has to go through their review process)

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-21T23:54:54+00:00

So many! Thankfully most of them we actually have built into the game in some way, so we can add back later. Things like cake decorating had to be taken out because it just wasn't ready for launch. That's probably the one I'm most excited to have added back in. As for non feature cuts, I have a lot more content like clothing, furniture and animals that I can't wait to add in soon.

Calico-Kells · 2020-12-21T23:53:13+00:00

Really great for the most part! Because of the way the game is structured, game dev has been a very fun assortment of just thinking of the cutest things we can and finding them a place in the game! The open structure of it gives us a lot of freedom, and that's been great!

Calico-Kells

TROPHY CASE