Hello, everyone!
Not gonna bury the lede - the form for Closed Playtest signups is live here:
https://forms.gle/2Fx1755W4J9YtyfZ6
Link to the Cat Lord Games Discord, where feedback and chat will happen: Cat Lord Games Discord
I really need your help. The game is ready for a massive content production push, but I want to make sure that the foundation is as stable as possible while there is still time for course correction, if that is what you all tell me is needed. I believe the basic functionality is there, and now I need a small audience, willing to test and give feedback, to help me prove it or fix it. The build is still Alpha. Not all of the writing has made it into the build, there is still so much to do. That’s all the qualifying I’m going to do, I promise.
On the update!
Just wrapped on a very productive two weeks. Several act one quests that are going to be live during the demo got revisions and better branching dialogues. Crafting got a bevy of new recipes for starting backgrounds.
The art team is wrapping the first group of portraits for the main PC, enough so that I was able to refit character creation to support them. Check it out!
I mentioned last time that I was also exploring customizing the heads of the in-game models to correspond to the art, and that is still in the early design phase. We do have a first test up and running though! More on that soon.
Almost all of the Demo-scoped content is ready. I have a small bit of work to do to wrap one questline up, but other than that, it’s time to get more eyes on it. A full QA pass with several classes was performed, attempting to press on various decision branches, failing skill checks, and so on, to see if there was enough variety in the content to feel good. Still some work to do on that front, but it is getting better.
Importantly, when I look at the four-step roadmap I laid out six weeks ago, I’ve stayed on target. Hopefully that gives you as much confidence as it does me.
As an aside, we were accepted into the Party-Based RPG Fest 2026, which starts on September 14th.
The primary focus of the next two weeks is simple: Get the build ready for Steam, get comfortable with the Playtest process there, procure Steam codes, and get them in your hands. I will also be doing some instrumentation work, which entails integration of an Analytics platform into the game so I can see what folks are experiencing. It’ll be opt-in, but it will help me tremendously, as I’ll be able to capture bottlenecks in the content, quests that start but are not resolved, secrets found or not, and so on.
Here's that Form link again:
https://forms.gle/2Fx1755W4J9YtyfZ6
Prepare for a Closed Playtest. I've got Steam SDK and Analytics integrations working, and am putting the last major designed feature into the game. This is a system I've wanted to build for a while, a rich Bestiary that lets each character use their trained Skills in the first round of the fight to advance their knowledge of their enemies. Progress is tracked, and bonuses kick in after enough growth. So far it's pretty fun! A detailed update on this system is probably the next update.\[/strike]
The Playtest will focus on the first hour of the game, and I have a bit of work to do on the starting town of Cartha, its people, and a few of the quests. Much of the work here is complete, but I will spend two weeks here ensuring that each narrative choice has the right level of variety, that the writing is up to the current standard (some of Cartha was written as long as three years ago, and needs editing if not wholesale rewriting).
Finish Cartha re-design, implement updates to the Crafting System, and QA the Playtest build, covering each class across as many of the viable narrative paths as possible. Putting off Act 2 work for now, to prioritize the Playtest Build.
If all goes well, it's mid-July and I'm ready to start the Playtest. I'll be handling this via Steam Keys to the private playtest build, distributed on the Cat Lord Games Discord server. It's quiet there now, but maybe we can change that. The goal of the Playtest is to smoke out any deal breakers before this build turns into an official Demo.