Six Years Later

Preamble

Two years after Cats are Liquid - A Light in the Shadows was released, a retrospective was published for it. Now, six years after the release of the prequel Cats are Liquid - A Better Place, I figured it was about time to write one for it as well.

This retrospective chronicles the development of the game all the way from the original conceptualization, to future plans for the studio. It contains never before seen screenshots and other tidbits of information about how the game came to be.

I hope this provides at least some useful insights into the game development process, and that you’ll find it enjoyable to read.

Now, let’s start with the most obvious question.

Why make another Cats are Liquid game?

To answer this, we need to take a trip back to early 2017.

Back then I was actively developing Loot Snake, a combination of a dungeon crawler and the classic game Snake. It was a far more ambitious project than the simple platformer that A Light in the Shadows had been.

Loot Snake was planned to have a myriad of power-ups, procedural maps, semi-immersive-sim style gameplay, and more, with a story driven campaign to top it all off. It was a lot. Perhaps a bit too much for someone who was still relatively new to the world of game development.

Eventually me from eight years ago came to the realization that I couldn’t implement what I had in mind for the game effectively with my skill set at the time. I needed something to act as a bridge to improve my skills for Loot Snake. Something less ambitious.

This was the spark that resulted in the development of a new Cats are Liquid game to begin in earnest. A quick little side adventure to hone my abilities, after which I could return to Loot Snake.

Why another Cats are Liquid game specifically instead of something brand new? For one, I had wanted to make another game in the series for a while. There were lots of things that I wished I would have done differently in A Light in the Shadows. It was also easier to have an existing IP as a jumping off point, as opposed to starting from scratch.

Nothing concrete had been made yet, but there was no shortage of ideas. With these ideas in hand, I moved on to creating a prototype.

Prototyping

A prototype is a version of a game created specifically to quickly test and validate different ideas. Those ideas can be anything: gameplay mechanics, underlying technical systems, literally anything. It’s a great way to check which ideas are worth pursuing further before fully committing to them.

Multiple prototypes were created for A Better Place, though most of them were developed within the same Unity project. The very early ones focused testing different physics configurations for the cat’s body, as well as trying out different abilities.

Early editor with all available items showcased (more items were implemented, but not spawnable through the editor).

Repurposed code from Loot Snake made up a significant chunk of the early prototypes. Perhaps the most obvious case of this was the editor. It was the same core system that Loot Snake had, just with a different UI and without the Loot Snake specific items of course.

Being able to reuse code like this was fantastic. Having something that’s already been proven to work before and ready to go in a minute or two really sped up the early development.

Filtering down ideas

There was no shortage of ideas for A Better Place. Gameplay wise, they ranged from small puzzles contained inside the buttons you press using the Companion, to beams of light with a multitude of different purposes.

For certain ideas, it was obvious that they didn’t fit the game almost immediately and were swiftly discarded. On the other hand, the ones that showed promise were quickly iterated on and playtested.

Most of the time the testing involved giving the prototype to another person and just seeing what happens, followed by a quick feedback session. This was crucial to maintain objectivity. Any idea can sound good and even work well in the creator’s hands, but giving it to another person will immediately reveal most problems: issues with controls, behavior not matching expectations, etc.

Screenshot of a prototype showing early projectile dispensers and air currents.

Lots of experiments were done with the movement of the cat. Early prototypes tested hit-stop like effects when switching states between solid and liquid forms, to add more impact to those moments. This was ultimately removed, as it made the movement really choppy and stuttery, while also making the cat feel frustrating to control.

Screenshot of an early prototype of the pick up ability.

When it comes to the abilities, one of the very first ones to be prototyped was the pick up ability. The idea for it stemmed from the boxes in A Light in the Shadows not having much use aside from taking up space. Or, to quote my past self:

Make the boxes a more prominent part of the game. Maybe add an ability pick up a box and carry it? Then throw it whenever the player wants to.

Over time, the boxes evolved into the throwable hexagons seen in World 5.

Continuous prototyping

Not everything was prototyped at this early stage. Certain, more “safe” ideas which didn’t involve lots of coding or had a very clear implementation plan were left for later in development. The same was done for some abilities, especially those which required a fair amount of level design work to test properly.

Quite ambitiously, both local and online multiplayer were briefly contemplated, but ultimately dropped. Adding multiplayer is not trivial, and would have needed proper consideration in every aspect of the game, which in turn would have needed additional development bandwidth that didn’t exist.

In-game online pack sharing was also considered (multiple times throughout development and even post-release), but for a large variety of mostly legal reasons never went anywhere.

The prototyping phase was officially completed in early June of 2018. Now, it was time to move on to making a proper plan.

The Plan

Creating a solid plan was important for two reasons: direction and time management.

Having clear direction is vital for long-term creative projects. The plan aided in this by outlining the game’s main features, how they connect together, and most importantly of all: the core emotions that the game intended to evoke.

It covered the broad strokes of the gameplay, such as encouraging fun movement and how the liquid state should feel, to more technical aspects like the level editor and support for localizations.

In a way, the plan also functioned as a vision document and design pillars. New ideas for the game could be compared against the plan and either approved, rejected, or further worked on based on how well they fit.

The plan intentionally omitted any details. Specifics have a tendency to change rapidly during development, so writing those down doesn’t provide much benefit.

In addition to the above, prioritization, preparing announcements, and really all scheduling related tasks became much easier with a clear plan as well.

Not everything listed in the plan ended up in the final game for a variety of reasons. One such dropped item was voice acting, another was collectibles.

After the plan was completed, a simplified version of it was published on June 9th on the devblog, setting expectations on what the final game would be like.

An excerpt from the original timeline.

This was followed by a timeline (based off of the plan) a few months later, published on the Cats are Liquid website. It listed the different phases of production and rough estimates for their completion.

I think the timeline helped a lot with communicating the current status of the game. There wasn’t a need to hunt down the latest progress update blog post and try to use that to deduce the overall state of it. A quick glance at the timeline was all that was needed.

The timeline did get adjusted a few times during development, but the original release window of “Late 2019” held.

From plan to reality

The game entered production right after the plan was released.

Most content from the prototypes was scrapped, apart from some small segments of code and certain textures and prefabs. Basic movement, along with the floating ability were the first things to be implemented. The editor was also ported over properly from Loot Snake. By late June, it was time to move on to developing the actual worlds.

The core of the worlds

Screenshot from an early version of World 2 Room 10.

The majority of the production phase was spent on constructing the “core” of each of the worlds. This “core” included the basic room layout and obstacles, as well as the ability of that world (when applicable), and nothing more. Polishing was left for later. Worlds were worked on linearly, with work on World 2 starting as soon as the core of World 1 was finished.

Playtests were ran for each world individually among a group of close friends, starting as soon as the first rooms in a world reached a playable state. It was vital to do as much testing as possible at this stage where everything was still easily adjustable, so that time wasn’t spent on finalizing a version of something that ultimately wouldn’t have worked or wasn’t fun to play.

What helped a lot with this process was having the definition of a “Cats are Liquid game” already established. It provided a nice set of restrictions of what the game should and shouldn’t have. That gave the development a lot of focus. This was quite different compared to A Light in the Shadows, which was a blank slate with no precedence.

Overall this process was great. Things moved along nicely on the gameplay and level design side, and moving through tasks on a world-by-world basis provided a clear understanding of the current progress.

Cuts

Sometimes, things just don’t fit properly into the game even after multiple iterations, so they get cut.

Probably one of the more interesting cut items was the “lava fall”. This was first tested in the prototypes, and made a brief appearance in the actual game as well.

Screenshot of a lava fall.

It was a spawner for droplets of lava, rendered using the same technology used for the cats to make them appear smooth. The reason it was cut was that it simply wasn’t that fun and didn’t really fit well visually with the rest of the obstacles.

Screenshot of a moving enemy prototype.

Moving enemies from A Light in the Shadows also made a brief appearance in the game. From what I recall and have been able to deduce from the repository commit history, these were abandoned almost immediately. They were cool to look at, but that was about it. And none of the worlds in A Better Place felt like a good fit to have them reappear in.

Though fewer, cuts were made later into development as well.

The original ability of the blue cat, being able to slow down time across an entire room, was reworked into stopping time completely for obstacles inside a small area.

There were two reasons for this: player movement related issues caused by slowing down time, and the fact that the ability wasn’t very engaging. You simply switched to the character and everything was in slow motion. The shipped version at least provides some agency to the player on where to apply the effect, and challenges them to position it properly to get past certain obstacles.

Audio

The audio side of things was quite interesting for me, since this time another person was doing the music and sound effects.

I’m not much of a musician. So getting Silent Tonality to help out with the tracks was invaluable.

Screenshot of Ableton.

He did a great job capturing the core melodies and emotions of the tracks from A Light in the Shadows, and remixing them to a far higher quality. The two wholly new original tracks created by him are fantastic as well.

My role on this front was more about setting the general direction of how I wanted the tracks to feel. Silent Tonality handled the rest.

It was a similar story for the sound effects as well. I knew I wanted a strong sense of physicality for them, and that’s what he delivered. Most of the effects were recorded on a Shure SM57 microphone with very little post processing applied afterwards.

Setting the scene

The game was intended to be a prequel from the start.

Excerpt of the cover page of an early story draft.

A prequel had the obvious benefit of not requiring players to have played A Light in the Shadows to get a bearing on the story. The previous game had also left some open questions on how the worlds were created, the voices talking in the neon rooms, and certain other aspects, which all seemed like interesting concepts to explore further.

To keep the surprise of the game being a prequel, it was referred to as a sequel in some very early blog posts and announcements. This ultimately lasted only a very short while, as I quickly realized that calling the game a sequel would end up being quite confusing once people got their hands on the game and noticed that it was actually a prequel. Because of this, it ended up being temporarily called “the next Cats are Liquid game” instead.

The first drafts of the story started to take shape around the same time as the prototypes were being developed. Though those drafts are nothing like what’s present in the final game.

A muddled plot

A short conversation between the NPCs and the player character in the original script.

Everyone was quite chatty in the original script. Even the Companion got a couple lines. Each character also got their own proper story arc, though the ones for the NPCs overlapped a lot.

A redacted version of an early introduction scene for the Companion.

Short interstitials were placed between some of the worlds, providing context for events happening elsewhere during the player’s adventures. Most of these were just two characters talking, and didn’t provide anything interesting for the player to do.

The purple cat played a vital role in this version of the story, and was a driving force behind most of the events. They too had loads of dialogue, a strong contrast to their presentation in A Light in the Shadows.

Around October of 2018, the unnecessary complexity of the story was realized. The plot lines were muddy and hard to follow. Events either moved at a breakneck pace to fit into the 12 world limit, or dragged the pace down to a halt to explain something in an interstitial.

By mid-November, the story had been rewritten to be more streamlined and focus on the star of the show: the playable cat. Only small parts of the World 1 script as well as the ending speech were retained from the original story.

After the rewrite, there weren’t many drastic changes made to the story apart from swapping the order of certain events around.

Interaction with the world

There was a vision for much stronger interaction between the story and the world, where the world would change to reflect the emotions the cat was feeling, sometimes to a drastic degree.

A massive list of ideas was thought of for this. From more basic ones such as the camera zooming out when the cat felt distant to the world around her, to morphing the rooms live as they were being played through.

The more dynamic effects proved to be a bit too time consuming and unnecessarily complex to implement for one off events, and were subsequently scrapped. The core idea still lived on, but in a more static form. Examples of these include the World 1 transition from 90 degree angles to more smooth shapes, the first appearance of the safe shape in World 3, and most of World 8.

A dedicated community

Compared to A Light in the Shadows, there was quite a sizable community following along with the development of A Better Place. Unlike previously where status updates didn’t get much attention, this time people were actively looking for any new information about the game.

I wanted to talk about the development relatively openly, while still preserving some surprises. Not revealing plot details was obvious, but this also extended to aspects like the game having 12 worlds, as well as the actual name of the game. This was a bit tricky at times, requiring careful thought on what and when specific elements could be shown in promotional material such as screenshots.

These surprises had the benefit of providing some much needed change of pace to the marketing of the game. Without them, most communication about it prior to the release would have just been a steady stream of “here’s what was worked on last week.”

Devblog

Regular blog posts on Tumblr were still the primary method of keeping people up-to-date on the progress of the game. They had the unique capability to provide a lot more detail and depth than a single tweet or message on Discord could.

I tried my best to make the status updates memorable instead of just boring bullet point lists. Sometimes this meant slightly eccentric writing or leaning into my expertise of telling the most bland and unimaginative jokes the world has ever seen. Despite that, people seemed to like those posts for the most part, and they were overall quite fun and enjoyable to create.

Discord

Setting up a public Discord server was honestly a bit scary.

Excerpt of the Discord announcement on Tumblr.

I had very little community management experience prior to this, and wasn’t sure at all how having a chat room full of random people from across the internet would go.

Turns out most of my fears were unfounded. Though there were rough patches, things were figured out over time, in large part thanks to members of the community who took it upon themselves to help out and whose contributions I’m eternally grateful for.

Getting to interact more closely with everyone on the server, as well as witnessing their amazing level of creativity first hand was, and continues to be, simply amazing.

The search for a better name

Naming the game “Cats are Liquid 2” didn’t feel right.

While that was used as a placeholder title in a few very early posts about the game, it seemed wrong for a multitude of reasons. Most prominent being that the game is a prequel and having a “2” at the end feels like it really ought to be a sequel.

Therefore, a search began to find a new name. Or as some might say: A Better Name.

This took several months. The total count of potential names was close to a hundred, way too large of a list to put here in its entirety. So let’s a look at a small selection of the most interesting ones instead:

• Cats are Liquid - Buried
• Cats are Liquid - Forgotten
• Cats are Liquid - Lost Memories
• Cats are Liquid - Phantoms
• Cats are Liquid - Phantoms Can’t Hang
• Cats are Liquid - Anew
• Cats are Liquid - A New Hope
• Cats are Liquid - The Empire Strikes Back
• Cats are Liquid - Brand New World
• Cats are Liquid - A New Place

A variation of that last one stuck, and on December 7th, 2018 the game was officially named Cats are Liquid - A Better Place. At the same time, the previous game also got the subtitle of A Light in the Shadows.

Things were going great! A name was picked, work was progressing quickly overall, what could possibly go wrong?

List of things that went wrong

After the core of the worlds was complete, things took a turn for the worse.

2019 had lots planned for it. Among other things, the first iteration of the merch store was set to be opened, and work was ongoing to release A Light in the Shadows on iOS. That latter one especially was taking a lot of focus away from A Better Place.

Excerpt from blog post announcing delays for certain milestones.

Despite the core of all worlds finishing on-schedule, barring an earlier timeline change, the timeline was still adjusted on July 19th, 2019. It was becoming obvious that certain tasks just weren’t going to get done by their original planned date. Regardless of this, the release of the game was still slated for “Late 2019”.

The misfortune continued for the rest of the year on multiple fronts.

Screenshot of the A Light in the Shadows iOS announcement.

The iOS launch of A Light in the Shadows was rough. It coincided with the 1.6.12 patch on other platforms, which also didn’t go well. On Steam, the launch options got messed up, resulting in people not being able to start the game. The Android version had its own host of issues.

With A Better Place things were better, but not great. The core movement system and abilities were still being adjusted, which in turn cascaded to needing changes to the room layouts and other aspects.

Pre-registration and wishlisting for the game launched alongside the release date announcement trailer on November 8th, but due to some technical issues the Google Play pre-registration was taken offline later that same day.

In addition to all of the above, there were some concerns about the stability of the in-game editor and whether that should be cut from the initial release of the game.

In hindsight, the game really should have been delayed at this point. It would have been the smart thing to do.

Nevertheless, it was released on the 12th of December, 2019.

A difficult launch

The launch definitely could have gone better.

The iOS and itch releases went alright, but there was trouble on Android as well as on Steam.

The Steam release was delayed due to an issue where the macOS version wasn’t properly signed, resulting in the game not starting up. This was fixed soon after being discovered, but wasn’t able to be reviewed by Valve before the planned release time.

On Android, the performance side of things left a lot to be desired. Quite a few players were reporting low frame rates and input lag. In retrospect, I should have used a wider selection of devices to do my testing on during development to get a better understanding of how the game ran. This will definitely be noted for future releases.

And of course, there were bugs. Thankfully most of the issues were minor, though there were a couple notable ones as well such as the text in the rooms disappearing if re-entering the game after watching the credits.

I’m quite content with the speed at which the bugs got fixed. Obviously it would have been better if there weren’t any to begin with, but still.

Post-launch

After the frenzy of patches right after launch, things calmed down.

The community overall seemed to enjoy the game quite a bit, which was wonderful to see. Some post-release content was published for the game, starting with the original soundtrack release on March 3rd, 2020, followed by a series of major updates.

Editor Update

Excerpt from the editor update overview post.

One key pain point in the initial release was the editor, and more specifically its lack of user friendliness. Players really wanted to create their own packs, but kept getting stuck with the unintuitiveness of it. So it made sense to focus the first major update on remedying that.

Undo functionality, easier destination selection for doors, pack images, and more were added in the Editor Update on the 22nd of July, 2020. Some quality-of-life features were sprinkled in as well.

The work put into this paid off ten-fold. Players have since pushed the editor and the game itself to its absolute limits and I’m amazed at the level of creativity and ingenuity on display whenever I come across the packs people have made. It’s honestly incredible.

Big Update

As the name would imply, this one didn’t have any specific focus area. It added a variety of new features like the speedrun mode and challenge medals. There were also some quality-of-life improvements, and the editor got some additional changes as well.

Anniversary Update

After a four year gap from the previous major update, and six years since the game was initially released, the Anniversary Update finally added localizations to the game. Remixable packs, a redesigned UI, and a host of other features and fixes were also added in this version.

Title screen in version 1.3.4.

Overall, I think this update leaves the game in a good place. There are no more major updates planned for the game. There will still of course be smaller patches for the foreseeable future to fix bugs and keep the game playable as technology evolves.

Some numbers

So how has the game done in the past six years?

A Better Place has surpassed A Light in the Shadows in total downloads with it rapidly approaching the seven million mark. “Downloads” here refer to both installs on mobile, as well as purchases on Steam and itch. That’s a truly mind blowing amount, and I’m grateful to every single person who gave the game a shot.

It has also maintained a high rating overall, being between 4.6-4.7 stars on mobile, with the lifetime reviews on Steam averaging at a 95% positive rating at the time I’m writing this.

With those numbers in mind, its no surprise that the community has grown to an even bigger size than what it was when A Better Place was in-development. There’s thousands of members on the Discord, with people chatting and sharing their own packs for the game every single day.

After all that

Things have been considerably more quiet in the past few years. So let’s run through some stuff that’s been happening behind the scenes.

Loot Snake

Promotional art for Loot Snake.

Loot Snake has unfortunately not been under active development for a long time. Working on A Better Place had made me feel a bit burnt out, to the point where I decided to take a break and work on something smaller before taking on Loot Snake again.

If you include the time it took to develop A Better Place, that break has now lasted over seven years.

Still, Loot Snake won’t be forgotten.

Other games

Several new games have been in development after the release of A Better Place. You can even see banners for some of these on the Last Quarter Studios website. The two games teased on there got quite far in development and one of them was almost ready to be revealed publicly, until something quite unexpected happened.

Unity Technologies, the company behind the Unity engine that the games used, announced a set of changes to its engine licensing terms on September 12th, 2023.

The most controversial of these changes was a proposed “runtime fee”, which in layman’s terms means a fee paid by the developer of a game that uses the Unity engine each time said game is installed on a device. This was a drastic change from how the engine was licensed up to that point.

What was especially concerning was the ambiguity around the definition of the runtime fee, and in which cases it would have applied. Especially when it came to situations such as the charity bundles the PC versions of the Cats are Liquid games have been included in, for example.

There were several clarifying statements and an eventual redaction of the runtime fee policy announced throughout September, but I already knew at that point that using Unity for these unreleased projects was not an option. Those versions of the games were scrapped, with only certain assets such as textures and audio being reused to an extent.

Note that the games themselves are not canceled, despite the major setback. It will take some more time though before they see the light of day.

10 years of Cats are Liquid

Most of 2025 was spent celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Cats are Liquid series. I put a lot of focus into stuff outside of the games themselves, such as resurrecting the merch store and commissioning artists for it, as well as working together with Silent Tonality on remixing the soundtracks of the games. It was honestly incredibly fun, and a nice change of pace from game development.

Thank you

And now we’ve caught up to the present day.

It was fun looking back at the development of A Better Place. Hopefully I’ll get to do this for every game I make. Maybe a bit faster than six years after release though.

I still approach game development from the perspective of a hobby, and that’s how I intend to keep doing it for the foreseeable future. It allows me to freely try out new things and enjoy the process of creation, without any worries about needing to make the next big hit, or anything else like that. I feel incredibly lucky that I get to pursue whatever ideas happen to come to my mind.

I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported the development of and played the Cats are Liquid games. No matter if you’ve just discovered them or have been playing since release, your support and encouragement mean the world to me.

On to the next game.

- Dev