



Hey everybody! Here’s another look into the development process behind Cattails!

When we set out to create a cat-simulation game, one of the first things we wanted was a myriad of options for player customization. In nature, cats appear in all sorts of beautiful colors, and we wanted to reflect that in our game.

We started out by creating the base white cat and most of its animations. That provided a great starting point for our ideas.





However, a problem quickly arose; The player has a ton of animation cycles and image frames, and recoloring each of those piece-by-piece for every possible color combination would take forever!

So instead, we started experimenting with sprite layering. We created a number of ‘pieces’ that could be drawn in a sequence to build up a unique cat.

Here’s an example to give you an idea of what one of our layers looks like:

In total, we created 19 unique layers that are combined to create a cat. The layers are things like stripes, spots, paws, eyes, face background, and a whole lot more. Our system gives us a huge amount of layers to work with, so we can create some amazingly unique cats!

On top of layering, we implemented blending on each layer individually. Each of the 19 separate pieces can be blended with any RGB color, producing tons and tons of different colorations. Here’s one example of what that looks like:

That’s not a very pretty cat, but you get the point.

In order to make our lives easier, we created an HTML tool that can be run in a web browser to generate live previews of different color colors for us to play around with. After finding a good combo, we have a handy-dandy ‘export to code’ button that transforms all the color data into usable GML code for us to use in Cattails.

Here’s a few of the “finished products”, to show off what our color-blending layer system can accomplish!

And finally, here’s a gif that shows off the color palette in game!

There’s colors for every event, season, and mood in Cattails, and collecting them all should prove to be a really fun challenge!

Got questions? Leave a comment! And if you can’t get enough of Cattails, you can follow us on social media with the links below!

-Tyler

———————-

Check out Cattails on social media!