I’m a cat lover and when I heard that there was concept art for a hero now knows as “Jetpack Cat”, I was intrigued. The reasons for its cancellation (taking things “too far” and the strange camera angle) make sense, and I spent the last few months on this project to make a character that could work. I plan texturing and animating it in both first and third person.

Model:

(imgur(.)com/a/fPhjO)

The things that I wanted to address first of all was the first person issue, that of not being able to see the paws on the controls in the concept art. The easiest solution was to simply have the cat move on all fours instead of siting up. The first person view will include both rockets as well as paws when moving. The cat’s movement is meant to be mostly horizontal rather than vertical.

On the subject of weapons, I had originally planned for the extra ammo to be stored in pouches on the cats back and reloaded in a motion similar to as if it were to sit down and scratch its head with a back foot. However, this seemed impractical and instead, I decided on a weapon that doesn’t use physical bullets, similar to Tracer’s pulse pistols, Mercy’s caduceus blaster, and Orisa’s fusion driver. Since the cat’s movements will be quick and light, its equipment needs to be light as well. The jetpack is used to increase the cat’s strength when pouncing and the wires on its front legs connect to retractable, superheating claws.

The visor doesn’t actually touch the head, it actually will float on either side connected by a wire or two, similar to Mercy’s halo. This device comes with a thought-to-speech program which allows the cat to communicate with teammates.

In game:

If this cat was actually in the game, she would have a small hitbox, but low health. Anywhere between 100 and 150. Squishy and mobile, she would be countered by just about any lock-on weapon (Symmetra), auto-aim (turret), or spray (Roadhog).

Skills:

Her primary weapon is the pair of rockets, with left click firing one at a time and alternating and right click firing both at once. However, she is actually meant to be played up in melee range and uses a Combo Point system like the rogues in World of Warcraft.

Pounce acts like Guardian Angel with charges, locking on to enemies and requiring a range. Upon landing, damage is dealt to the target and the player gains one combo point.

Pounce will also increase damage that the target takes by 5%. The next pounce increases damage taken by 10%, then 15%, and so on. The debuff resets to 5% when out of charges or when combo points are spent.

With a minimum range, this means that the ability can’t be used on the same person over and over again in melee range, the player would have to back up every time or the target would have to be running away. Ideally, one would string a chain of Pounces together in a group of enemies, giving them all the increasing damage debuff.

Superheated Claws consumes all current combo points to deal damage to a single enemy and reduces healing received. The more combo points are used, the more healing is reduced, the longer the debuff lasts, and the more damage is done. However, this also increases its cooldown. The ideal way to play her would be to string five Pounces and use a full-powered Superheated claws, retreating and using the rockets until Claws is off cooldown.

Her ultimate is Feline Fury, which causes her to pounce rapidly between enemies within a certain range of each other with up to ten pounces maximum. The Pounce debuff is not applied, but the flat damage that she deals increases between jumps and with each jump, she is healed by 10%-15% of her maximum health per unique target hit. This means that even if she pounces between two players ten times, she will only recover about 20% health.

The passive Nine Lives lets her respawn 25% faster from environmental damage. Deaths by falling would be replaced with the “twist-the-tail-to-balance” that cats do and would elicit a sound of surprise rather than a scream.

Her texture will be based off of my real life cat, who will have died by the time this project is done.