Catsitter

Stack cats! Don’t let them fall!

A game about stacking cats on a bed, with realistic cat physics. A friend and I made Catsitter for the Ludum Dare 42 game jam in the summer of 2018. You can see the results of the jam here. The game is available for download on Windows, Mac, and Linux on itch.io.

This project was a way for my friend and I to spend some time together after a busy stretch of life. We collaborated on the game’s design and split the remainder of the duties: my friend handled programming and sound design, I handled the art. Below you’ll find a description of my contributions as artist, a collection of screenshots, and a let’s play someone uploaded a few months after the jam.

ARTIST

The biggest puzzle of this project was figuring out how to create pixel art cats that

  1. looked like cats, and

  2. tiled relatively well with each other.

Because the gameplay was basically a freeform version of Tetris, we wanted to have the cats appear to fit together in nice ways. If you’re really careful with your placement, you can actually get them all to line up. Catsitter’s joy comes from the moments when that precision falls apart.

In order to give the cats a tile-like quality, I kept their shapes simple, opting for more straight lines over natural shapes. Additionally, I tried to keep most animated parts inside the cats’ main shapes so they didn’t shift on the bed after being set down.

I used Aesprite for all of the sprite development and Photoshop for developing an icon and some desktop wallpapers. Aesprite’s built-in animation tools and pixel focused workflow made creating the assets incredibly smooth, while Photoshop’s flexibility made it easier to create high-resolution images that needed to scale to different resolutions.

Most of the game’s assets + icon