Hello everybody! It’s time once again for the monthly development update!
And wow, what a month it has been! I can’t wait to dive into all the details. BUT FIRST, a major announcement!!
The free public demo for Cattails: Wildwood Story is AVAILABLE NOW on Steam!!!! 😻🙀😻
We have been working so hard on bringing the demo to life! This is the first chance that anyone and everyone can play a sample of the game for themselves. Just open up the Steam page, hit download, and you can play through the entire first season of Spring! Wow!!
We can’t wait to hear all about everyone’s experiences with the demo. Let us know if you’re planning to try it out! You can download the demo right now on Steam!
Beta v0.40
And that’s not all! We’ve also got a new version, Beta v0.40, available now for our Kickstarter beta-tier backers. Please note that this update is only for beta-tier backers. Sorry demo players!
Let’s talk about what’s included!
Rival Marriages
By far the most exciting new feature in beta v0.40 is the Rival Marriages system! Certain cat residents may get to know each other very well and pair up as a couple.
There are certain predetermined NPC pairings. Once you’ve befriended both NPCs of a potential couple and treated them very well, one of them may approach you and ask for a bit of relationship advice. You can either encourage them to get with their specified partner, in which case they will soon get married and move in together, or discourage them from pursuing a relationship, in which case they will listen to your advice and remain single.
We’ve done things this way to ensure that you, the player, aren’t “locked out” from dating or marrying a cat that you really want to date by factors outside of your control. However, please note that if a rival marriage couple does end up together, they will remain together and at that point will not be available to romance in the future.
There are 5 rival marriage pairings. We don’t want to spoil who ends up with who, but we’re happy with how it all came together and can’t wait to hear what you think!
Rival Marriage Kittens! 🐈
Yes, that’s right! Rival marriage couples can eventually have their own little kittens that will become a part of your colony!
Between the 5 rival marriage pairings, there are 8 new kittens that can be born! We’ve once again worked with the talented Narabas Artworks on bringing these kitten portraits to life. Here’s a very limited sneak-peak at the cute new portraits 😻
Of course, you can talk to, befriend, and buddy up with these new kittens as well. They add so much life to town with their energy!
At the moment, Rival Marriage couples may seem to get together rather abruptly. With everything going on (demo launch + other publishing tasks,) we were able to implement the Rival Marriages system, but not the other planned system which will support it: Events. These character events will allow us to inject some much-needed personality and pacing into the lives of the residents of your colony, and we plan to use them to make the build-up to a rival marriage proposal much smoother. Stay tuned for more on Events in future updates.
A Note on New Game+ and Rival Marriages:
We’ve made the decision to reset all relationships to their default values when a New Game+ file is created. That includes Rival Marriage pairings. In practice, this means that when you start up a fresh New Game+ savefile, you’ll find any previously-paired Rival Marriage couples will no longer be together, and any kittens they may have had together will be gone from town. But don’t worry! You can work to bring them together again, just like you’ll be working to re-befriend the cats around town. By doing things this way, you won’t be locked out of dating and/or marrying these cats in your New Game+ savefiles.
Wild Red Roses
A minor tweak, but one that was requested by a few of our players, is that we’ve added a spawn location for Red Roses to the Old Farm map region (upper-left hand corner of the map.) Each day 1 Red Rose will spawn here, so you can get started dating a cat of your choosing quicker if you’d like (before Ember starts carrying Red Roses at their shop.)
Localization Underway!
Lastly, we wanted to update you all on the status of our German & Spanish localizations!
Our localization partners are currently working very hard on bringing these translations to life, but localization is a very time-consuming process. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes this month to get the game ready for localization, but we’re only at the start of the journey.
A fun story: When we started development of Cattails: Wildwood Story, we sat down and did some quick-and-dirty napkin math, coming up with the conclusion that at the end of development the game would probably have around ~100,000 English words. That’s approximately the length of an average novel (!!!)
HOWEVER, what we didn’t consider was all the stretch goals, character dialog updates, and extra fun stuff that we’ve added along the way! When we crunched the numbers, we quickly found out the reality of the situation… The game is already approaching 200,000 words!! 🙀 Twice our original estimate!
(Imagine this, but waaaay more text! These are the kind of files we’re working with as we localize the game.)
We’re really happy with both the quantity and the quality of the text as-is, but all those extra words require a lot of extra work & time from the localization team! Long story short, things are happening on the localization front, but work will be proceeding at a slow-and-steady pace for the foreseeable future.
Okay, that about wraps things up for the June update! Please remember to wishlist us if you haven’t already, and feel free to try out the demo if you’d like to see what the game plays like ahead of the full launch on Steam later this year.
Until next time!
-Tyler (@FalconDevelops)