Updates from PastryCats Official Blog:
It’s tricky to guess which bits of game dev interest players (we’re tunnel-visioned from years of working on it!), so this has been enlightening! Thanks to 14 of you curious souls supplying us with your burning questions, we have compiled a bona fide FAQ. Please note that all answers are given...
blog.pastrycats.com
It’s tricky to guess which bits of game dev interest
players (we’re tunnel-visioned from years of working on it!), so this has been enlightening! Thanks to 14 of you curious souls supplying us with your burning questions, we have compiled a bona fide FAQ. Please note that all answers are given based on our
current development and thinking; anything can change (for the better!)
😀
Feast your eyes~ or browse the handy table of contents somewhere-abouts. Questions have been reworded slightly, and some answers have been expanded on since we last emailed.
Bonus: a work-in-progress prize for our first raffle winner, Ace: meet Roxie!
Breeding
How do genetics work with a food-based creature like a picat? What traits will be passed down to kittens?
We’re plotting an abundance of fun thematic traits, but here’s just a few for starters—picats have unique foodie stats like:
- Breed: the 🌟 mechanic! Breed is the strangest, based loosely on real-life (and fictional) recipes. Fellow enthusiasts of real-world Mendelian inheritance: we definitely want to incorporate that, probably for color genes (or a hybrid of Mendelian + simple mixing).
- Taste: sweet umami bitter salty tart! While taste values increase from training and activities, they don’t get directly passed down. Instead, the genetic potential (for each taste) is passed down to kittens.
- Texture: airy vs. dense; springy vs. crumbly. These are inheritable, but there are other ways to influence the “baking” process and thus kittens’ starting textures.
- Appearance: coat colors & patterns, inherited from the parents.
- Taste-specific traits: such as the “ancestral color” formula that tart cats know. Per the name, each kitten inherits this knowledge from one of the parents.
- Others to be expanded upon: size (measured in spoons), base temperature, flavor variants, flavor notes, …
As of writing, we’ve programmed a working recipe-based breed-determination mechanic and are exploring what further genetics or prep-work influence that equation! You can read a detailed write-up of our breed-recipe mechanic on our blog
here.
Are there crossbreeds between different pastries?
Generally, no; while ingredients (water cats, flour cats, etc.) crossbreed to eventually produce pastry cats, crossbreeding ends once you achieve a recognizable pastry. So, a pie cat x cookie cat always = one of the two (or even an ingredient to either pastry).
But worry not if you’re hoping for more exciting combos: just as real life bakers create experimental pastries, we may
in the future add creative crossbreeds; who knows!
How will new recipes/breeds be discovered? Do players have to find new recipes themselves?
There’s a few ways to discover new recipes. Nina says, “You can purchase some basic recipes from shops, trade recipes with other players, and discover special/themed recipes from exploration & quests. During the beta phase and beyond, we’ll gradually add new recipes, and we’re planning a system for players to develop new recipes + breeds
🙂”
Look out soonish for a more in-depth post exploring how recipes are integral to planning your breeding projects!
Are the picats just pastries, or are there desserts too?
We’re highly inclusive on the definition of a pastry—stretching to encompass any baked goods, pretty desserts (cakes), and flour-free treats.
Heeey, this is the chef’s kiss spot to showcase some of the pastry suggestions. No promises on
when they’ll make it in, but we’d love to include~~ macaroons, sweet potato pie, kutsinta, moon cakes, mochi, syrnyky, tiramisu, and churros—for a taste! Mmmmm that’s a lot of good treats already.
Are there flavor variants of picats (chocolate versions, etc.)?
Yes: just as a danish pastry comes in many toothsome flavors—chocolate danish, cheese danish, lemon danish—so does a picat! Not only can you breed for different flavors, rumor has it that skillful picat tailors can decorate their clients to achieve new flavors…
You once mentioned “outlandish” breeding mini-game systems..?
Ah!—caught me red-handed, slyly alluding to things our team hasn’t fully developed (or even agreed upon). I’ve written in my notes “gene-pairing in the form of grid puzzles,” but it’s just an idea; we’ll have to see if it survives our rigorous prototyping/playtesting!
Gameplay
Will there be combat?
Actually,
no, and that’s a deliberate choice
🙂 Nina says: “We two are really interested in conflict, but we want to express it in different ways, like perhaps via competition, creative problem solving, diplomacy, etc.”
In the Pastry Dimension, no creature hunts to kill; rather, creatures harvest their “prey”—perfecting the dexterous art of hunting without hurting—and “death” occurs at their natural expiration date, just like perishable goods! This does not, however, mean the world of Pastry Cats is utopian or preclude stories that thoughtfully explore heavier themes around conflict.
What will the average daily play time be? How often will players be expected to log in? How will you ensure players won’t get bored, or is it a game you only spend 2 hours maximum on per day?
Nina says, “This is a design question that I’ve thought about from the beginning for sure. I’ve personally been a player who sometimes wants to stay on a game for hours but sometimes just doesn’t even want to log on because I’m busy for the entire season. I certainly don’t enjoy having to do dailies just to ‘keep up’.”
“My goal is to design the game so that it is respectful and
supportive of your day and how you want it to fit into your life, and not demanding. Players would not be expected to log in every day or spend a specific amount of time. Ideally it can support however much time you’d like to spend in the PastryCats world (perhaps from 10 minutes to 2 hours or longer).”
So (back to me!) we definitely want
meaningful, even if succinct, gameplay! As an aside, we’re also developing a roleplay system literally embedded in the explorable world of PastryCats, inspired by MUDs. Among other community-based activities! And, of course, challenging pastry recipes that need a ton of breeding planning to pull off.
How much of the gameplay will be scripted behavior versus freeform roleplay?
Let me first clarify: I understand that some of the gameplay
prototypes may have given false impressions of actual gameplay! It’s easier for us to playtest using designer tricks like
“Wizard of Oz” prototyping, or a series of text replies to simulate a real game engine. Rest assured that
the main meat of gameplay is programmed behavior you’d expect from a fully-featured browser game; only the exploration mechanic involves a dash of spiced-up roleplay.
Nina explains, “The early part of our prototyping process involves lots of fast iterations of us roleplaying a scenario of gameplay, helps us get a feel for it and to see if it’s fun, fits with our vision, etc. And then it might pass through to the next stage of prototyping (we actually program it). So yeah there’s no freeform roleplay or GM involved in the final design!”
What’s the turn-based system you mentioned?
Most activities with picats involve a turn-based system. Respecting their autonomy, you as the baker-player can only “request” and entice picats to perform actions, after which the picat too takes a turn to express their free will! A request might be something like following a command or playing with a training toy. After a picat reacts to your move, they might separately make an unrelated move, such as hiding or fleeing if they want privacy!
Worldbuilding
Will there be detailed lore/worldbuilding/story?
A hearty yes! Nina says, “We’ve been actively developing the world and its lore, and personally lore is one of my favourite aspects of a game. I’d play through really clunky games just for juicy lore.”
We’re detailing a whole history of the Pastry Dimension that you can discover tiny glimmers of as you play. We favor a show-don’t-exposit style of writing
🙂
How does exploration work?
Exploration is undergoing continuous poking (I’m never satisfied…), so here I’ll present our inspiration and vision~ our exploration is inspired by interactive fiction games and even MUDs (think multiplayer maps of rooms stuffed with intriguing items that have multiple ways to interact with them).
It’s primarily narrative based, with minimal art, and will support chatboxes—and therefore roleplay
😀. That said, depending on our artist resources (aka Violet’s stamina), it’s always possible for the ratio of art to increase.
I’m most excited to work on the
player-customizable side of exploration. I’d dearly love for players to have the ability to create/shape their own cozy spaces in the explorable worlds. Ambitious, yes! Now you see why exploration is under heavy development with no concrete plans yet…
Will there be weather events for different areas?
Extremely likely for our exploration system! However, at this stage of development, we’re focused on
indoor picat care.
Are there other food-related animals in this world?
But of course!
Every animal you encounter here is a little strange
🙂 Herb birds drop spicy feathers (oops, we’re conflating herbs & spices because “herb bird” sounds poetic). Crop horses once raced along the misty rings of planets. Crystal bats tune in to radio waves… and more!
Aesthetics
Will we be able to decorate our picats with clothing or even frosting?
Absolutely yes to the frosting and other cake-topping bling! Decorating is so integral to the Pastry Dimension that picats themselves are capable of decorating each other;
you are merely the orchestrator and designer.
Nina says, “Your picats can use different pastry decoration techniques, so decorations include pastry-appropriate things like glaze, cream, ganache, meringue, fondant, and sprinkles. Also with different colors, based on the cat’s personal set of colors known.” That includes the inheritable
ancestral color!
Adorning them with less food-like decorations such as apparel will also be possible. For now, we’re focusing on traditional pastry decorations.
How much can we customize picats? Will there be player-drawn skins/accessories and other player-created content?
Besides decorating them (which can potentially involve player-to-player accessorizing of picats)… we’re very interested in inviting player-created content. We have ideas (slated for alpha) for player-made zones encountered during exploration: these are mostly text-based rooms that can be interacted with much like interactive fiction.
As for player-drawn art: eventually, but it might be some time away! We’ve got to work out how the standardization and moderation should shake out.
Developing the game
Will there be a crowdfunding campaign?
Possibly! Nina clarifies, “We’d like to do a crowdfunding campaign some time after Alpha Kitten (end of this year) and before Beta, but nothing concrete has been planned yet.” (Alpha Kitten is our tiny private alpha testing period, hence the cute name!)
Do you plan to hire more team members?
Not for a long while! Although we’re a tiny duo, we like our lithe size
😀 I tentatively foresee a need for a skilled community manager if the player base ever outgrows our ability to keep the community shipshape.
What transpired during that eerie yearlong silence of ours, punctuated by the occasional peep on social media? Joyfully productive development clocking in at 31 prototypes, lovingly hammering out mechanics and lore, with more in the works!
blog.pastrycats.com
What transpired during that eerie yearlong silence of ours, punctuated by the occasional peep on social media? Joyfully productive development clocking in at
31 prototypes, lovingly hammering out mechanics and lore, with more in the works!
How it’s going
Since December 13 of 2023—the creation date of our local 2-person forum board (
see our post about it)—
we have been prototyping nonstop.
The
good: we feel much more confident that our game mechanics are delightfully fun and present meaningful choices! Seeing as each prototype is structured as a text-based mini-game, we’ve been honing our game design chops like mad. Our prototyping process is (at last) lightweight and deeply collaborative.
The
murky: there were patches when many promising prototypes had to be scrapped on the cutting board because they swelled out of scope.
Let me regale you with our prototyping tales and woes! This post offers a peek at our machinations, covering our prototyping process, examples, tips, and insight. It may be of interest if you’re a fellow burgeoning game designer
or if you want assurance we’re still hard at work!
Anatomy of our prototypes
The content of our prototypes runs the gamut of
choice-based text adventure / play-by-post forum roleplay / pure text online tabletop. Each prototype inhabits a forum thread as short as a few replies to over 100 responses long (particularly our breeding prototypes). They target one mechanic (e.g. umami training) or even a fragment of a mechanic (e.g. how picats communicate) with a specific end-goal in mind. The
problem statement steers the design of the prototype or sets the criteria for success. My prototypes’ problem statements tend to involve open-ended questions, whereas my partner focuses on success metrics.
The two of us each design and control our own prototypes as the
game master (GM), while the other acts as the
playtester. We have our own ways of determining when to conclude a prototype (after X in-game days, or when Y game goal is achieved), although if we’re truly not “feeling it” (a highly-subjective, vibe-based determination), we abort it early. Typically, we
debrief one another with a questionnaire checking if the experience was fun, what questions ran through the other’s mind, etc., tailored to the prototype. I’ll present some sample post-prototype questions later in this post.
Particularly if the prototype had to be abandoned, one of us will then design an alternative prototype hoping to fix the flaws of the previous one or expand it. (When one designer feels stuck, the other picks up the pieces with a fresh perspective!) Thus the cycle begins anew.
Enough exposition! Presenting actual prototypes
Here are our 31 prototypes:
Prototype catalogue also viewable here
Case Study: Pi-chats of Caterwauling Cakes
A disclaimer: a number of our prototypes aren’t intended to translate directly to gameplay, although they may serve as inspiration.
I’ve chosen to share the following prototype because it signaled a positive turning point during our grueling prototyping journey. The scenario itself—caring for picats while simultaneously managing a bakery front—is not currently representative of our plans for the primary care mechanics in PastryCats. However, it may reappear in a different form…
The anchoring problem statement:
How do picats communicate? The premise: three picats, three rooms. They communicate verbally or with body language. Random events occur. The player reacts.
Welcome to your bakery,
Caterwauling Cakes, a charming two-room affair featuring:
- a café in the front, where you serve customers
- a kitchen in the rear, where you toast pastries
- a garden in the backyard, where you gather spices.
You are famous in the land for your prized tiramisu, velvet cake, and pumpkin pie—all harvested from your three picats… who are apt to roam and find themselves in predicaments.
It’s a bleary dawn. Time to harvest the day’s pastries to sell.
You have for sale:
- 0 tiramisu
- 0 velvet cake
- 0 pumpkin pie
In the cafe, you see (object — possible actions):
- three picat food bowls (empty, empty, empty) — fill with food — shake noisily
- Tira meows, “🍞.” Her ears are relaxed.
- feather wand — play
- tables and chairs to seat customers
- display case of baked goods
- door to kitchen — exit
You hear:
- muffled meows from the kitchen
- faintest birdsong from the garden
With picats, you can
try to:
- coax with a treat (from your treat pocket)
- pet
- harvest
- pick up / place down
You have 2 actions before the time of day changes.
What action will you take?
> Fill those bowls with food!!
🔊 The food clatters loudly in the bowls.
Tira eats from her bowl.
Velvet emerges from the door to the kitchen and eats from her bowl.
> Harvest Tira and Velvet now that they are out!
Tira and
Velvet, busily eating, hardly notice you as you harvest. You gather 🍮🍮🎂🎂🎂.
And so on. Every “time of day” change triggers random events, rolled from the
Table of Moods or Events:
- hello (including trust)
- interest in you
- wants attention
- wants to play
- interesting smell
- wants to check scents
- wants to mark scent
- wants to be alone
- hunting
- grooming
- scratching
- proofing
- hungry
- surprised
- danger
Analyzing the prototype: Pi-chats of Caterwauling Cakes
I administered this prototype to my partner, spanning a total of 79 back-and-forth replies. (By the end, my player had served 13 customers and was bestowed the
Baking Star of Excellence with an average customer rating of 4.65/4!)
The final verdict: she adored how the actions and interactions reinforced their cat-like and
picat-like natures. She also enjoyed the passage of time and the sense of space in the café. A constant cycle of customers to serve created a feeling of urgency, not to mention an event to mark the time. Multiple rooms to explore, distinguished by their purpose, created the sense of space. The two dimensions of time and space added dynamism to the prototype—so distant a sensation from a static pet care routine.
One delicious insight I’d like to share is the power of
randomness. A curious feature of randomness:
at a micro scale, pattern and meaning seem to emerge from purely random rolls. (In reality, at the macro scale, enough rolls will average out the results.)
It’s human nature to discern patterns and signals from pure noise. Despite rolling random picat reactions
with no modifiers, my player perceived distinct personalities nonetheless. Throughout the prototype, Pumpkin the picat frequently rolled the random events
14 (surprise) and
15 (danger).
Pumpkin can be seen inside an oven with the door firmly shut. Her ears twitch as she yowls, “‼️.”
(Don’t panic: all picats biologically tolerate the extreme heat of an oven!) After my partner opened the oven door:
Pumpkin issues out like a sudden gush of water. After landing, she raises her tail casually.
You may notice a persistent theme: interactions with picats are framed as
trial-based. You as the player can
try to perform actions with your picats, but it remains to be seen if they assent. Moving forward, our care mechanics will tightly revolve around enticement and consent-seeking! We hope this will add both roleplaying flavor denoting a mutually respectful relationship and mechanical flair now that failure becomes possible. (This is good fodder for a future blog post, hmm!)
A useful post-prototype questionnaire
We conclude our prototypes by gathering feedback from the playtester (the other one of us) in two stages:
- General impressions, tip-of-the-tongue thoughts. I will quite literally ask my partner, “First: what are your freeform thoughts?” I want to know what’s foremost on her mind at the conclusion of a prototype, unbiased by the questions I will later ask. (Occasionally we’ll interrupt in the middle of a particularly long prototype to gather these impressions—and possibly veer course based on that feedback.)
- Structured questions, hand-picked from a shared pool of good post-prototype questions (inspired by our game design books). These are often tailored to the prototype itself or supplemented by more specific questions, probing ground not covered by the general impressions.
Here is a sample of the structured questions we ask each other:
- What emotions did you feel while playing?
- What about the gameplay and/or game rules surprised you?
- Which parts are fun? Which aren’t?
- Do you feel that the choices you’re making are meaningful?
- What questions went through your mind while playing? What were you curious about?
- Did you feel like there were clear goals presented? What were your personal goals?
- What, if any, motivations did you feel to play?
- What actions do you wish you could do in the game but currently cannot?
Emotional variety and surprise support good fun. Infusing meaning into choices makes the activity of gaming feel worthwhile. Curiosity indicates investment; we’re curious creatures after all! Goals bring clarity and make a mechanic approachable. There’s value in probing the missed opportunities of actions not present in the prototype to see what could be improved upon.
The results of the structured questions provide direction for the future of that mechanic. Does it need reworking? What was the highlight of the experience, and can we
lean more on those strengths?
For the “Pi-chats” prototype, I asked my playtester the additional question, “What do you think of each of the specific picats—Tira, Velvet, and Pumpkin?” (I could have better phrased that as, “What did you think of their personalities?”) I wished to know if random rolls in small doses could masquerade as genuine personality. The response: she felt that Pumpkin was more on the clumsy side.
From design burnout…
Scope-creeping prototypes can ignite design burnout in us. My first attempt to mock up a new direction for daily care became a sprawling hour-by-hour slog. Each in-game hour, from game-time sunup to sundown, my partner had to pick from an unwieldy set of 14 asymmetrical actions. She lasted until 7 PM, day one, over 22 protracted real-life (RL) days.
Lesson learned: overwhelming, inscrutable choices are not suitable (for a cozy cat game).
The most egregious misstep was a tart training prototype (“Quarrying Zest”) with a “simple” goal (thoroughly decorate three picats with toppings quarried from the Zesty Zenith according to stringent decoration guidelines) that plodded along for a mighty 39 RL days and
78 replies. The rotten cherry on top: we judged that prototype as “needs reworking.”
Lesson learned: bake into each prototype a sustainable deadline. …Scratch that, I failed to learn that lesson, evidenced by the second iteration of tart training that was abandoned for being “too complex and unwieldy” and the third that stretched to an undesired record of 71 RL days and 67 replies before I pulled the plug.
Shortly after my partner took over designing the tart taste, I reviewed our past prototype hits & misses and arrived at our current
lightweight design procedure—
a system for designing prototypes.
…To design workhorses
What is a (game) prototype but a flexible tool to test (game) ideas with low investment?
Our prototypes currently evolve through
four stages:
- The “two-reply” forum prototype (this might actually prove too short, as I’ll discuss…)
- The expanded forum prototype
- The semi-automated prototype
- The isolated, programmed prototype
Reservations at any stage can bump us back to the start. Also, as you’ll see, my thoughts on this system are still messy. I hope to have something more polished to share in time!
The “two-reply” forum prototype
When a game mechanic is in its nascent stage—no concrete ideas boxing it in—any and every wild notion is fair play. It’s an exciting time, and ideas come easily and cheaply! However, the overwhelming possibilities must be pared down.
The “two-reply” forum prototype is the first step in the process of confirming the viability of a concept and developing it into a workable form. The point is to design a prototype intended to conclude after two replies from the playtester. The immediate benefit: a baked-in, sustainable deadline as short as one RL day.
The intended structure is as follows:
- The setup: the GM introduces the prototype and presents an array of choices.
- Playtester (PT) reply #1: PT makes a choice.
- The twist: the GM reveals the result of that choice in a way that alters the scenario. The outcome is improvised, not predetermined. New choices are presented, or the old choices are presented in a new light, feeling mechanically different.
- PT reply #2: PT chooses a second time.
- The conclusion: the GM reveals the result of the second choice and optionally concludes the prototype in a narratively satisfying way.
At this early stage,
gameplay is heavily improvisational—largely drawing on roleplaying and storytelling—while adhering to a general idea. I design mine to have
minimal calculations and randomness in favor of
creative, improvised outcomes.
Here’s an example heavily abridged from an early hunting competition prototype:
- GM: You’ve entered Sugarcute into the annual Harvest hunting bonanza. You can deliver one order to Sugarcute at the start of the Harvest: target one of three quarries or wait to see what competitors do?
- PT: Target the sparrow toy.
- GM: The harvest horn sounds… <various competitor actions> Nearing the sparrow, a competitor slows pace and hunches to stalk her prey, Sugarcute close behind. What will you signal to Sugarcute: change quarry, continue stalking, or take a risk and pounce on the sparrow toy?
- PT: Take a risk and pounce
- GM: <exciting results of the competition>
Here’s a bonus example abridged from a weaning prototype:
- GM: The quartet of kittens mews hungrily and eyes you warily. What percentage of wet kitten food will you mix in with the milk? 1/10, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3, or 1/2?
- PT: 1/5
- GM: One kitten rejects the mixture, while the others have <various positive reactions>. The next day… What percentage of wet kitten food will you mix in with the milk?
- PT: <various proportions tailored to each kitten>
- GM: <various positive reactions>. In just 2 days of gentle care, the kittens have made admiral progress in their weaning and socialization. When the day comes that they are sent to their forever homes, it will be thanks to your tender care!
“Two” begs the question: why not
more replies? Honestly, there were prototypes the playtester felt were cut too short—before the chance to fully explore the available choices. Thus, I’m hesitant to prescribe an exact limitation of
two replies. However, the general idea stands: keep it deliberately short! (Arguably, the fact that a playtester drew enjoyment and was willing to engage is powerful evidence that a prototype is ready for the next stage!)
Expanded forum prototype
After clearing the “two-reply” forum stage, the next step is to expand that successful initial prototype into something spanning up to 30 back-and-forth replies. We take into account the previous prototype’s strengths and weaknesses (based on the GM’s observations and the playtester’s questionnaire feedback). Often, the result is a continuation (with mechanical tweaks!) of the original prototype—extending it to several days, setting a harder end condition, etc., and with a different set of picats to avoid playtester bias. (Occasionally, we’ll recycle picat names as a fun nod to continuity!)
Vitally, this stage is where we introduce (or increase)
dice rolls and light calculations to simulate gameplay. Naturally, it’s more involved to compute by hand, which is why it’s essential to have validated the idea in the previous stage! (We used to develop expanded-length forum prototypes straight out of the gate: a slog for both the playtester and the GM.)
Semi-automated prototype
This is an optional step we take, particularly for prototypes concerning long-term, complex decisions such as breeding. We design a semi-automated prototype using software with “lite” database capabilities.
For our breeding prototype, we opted for Semantic MediaWiki because it’s free, flexible with both data-querying and custom data display (so we can generate formatted text like “♂
Lincoln - medium silver flour”), and familiar to us. Other options include spreadsheets, knowledge management systems, and interactive fiction tools like Inform 7 and Twine (with which we’ve made small games for each other!).
“Semi” does the heavy lifting: we try to avoid over-engineering these prototypes, or we may as well skip to full-fledged programs. A minor blessing is that third-party software can make prototyping fun and playful (for us)!
Programmed prototype
Finally, with the confidence of a mechanic surviving two-to-three-plus stages of prototyping, work can begin on the fully automated prototype. We’re all but creating the game here—using the same framework and programming language as the final product, but keeping the code and database tables isolated. Siloing different mechanics allows us to independently test them
and sidestep production concerns like maintaining compatibility.
Our two mechanics at this stage—breeding and cooking-crafting—co-exist in a Phoenix (Elixir framework) application with separate picat database tables. The eventual plan is to make them playable (with a threadbare interface) and possibly script them to run autonomously so we can observe them at an accelerated, longitudinal scale.
(In our previous approach, we crafted all mechanics fully-integrated, constructing the whole game as we went. This was fraught with problems—lacking a rigorous vetting process for one!)
Next post… a sneak peek at our cooking-crafting system?
ID: A petal pot for picats to step up and cook with! Brassy bulb, petal-lace rim, and purple lacquer step-petals curling out from the base. This cooking pot has three stubby legs. Pastel background. Bottom right text: pastrycats.com in all caps.
