Customer Cat Postmortem

Customer Cat was my first experience with Defold, and I used it to make a small Bitsy-inspired game. I only had a few days to work on it for a game jam, which is why the game ended up being so short, rushed, and ultimately not very interesting. Even so, I learned a lot from the experience, and that alone made the project worthwhile.

The Idea

A Bitsy game is essentially a collection of rooms, characters, objects, and dialogue, where the player explores the world by interacting with each of those elements. I wanted to make a game in that style about a cat who is incredibly entitled and constantly complains about the not-so-beautiful world around it, especially whenever it’s treated like an ordinary customer. Since the jam’s theme was “toxic”, I thought the concept fit perfectly.

The Development

I won’t lie, I expected to ship a game with far more features than I ultimately did. However, Defold’s GUI system and hierarchy URLs were a bit confusing at first, so I spent a significant amount of time just learning how they worked before I could implement even the basic features.

My original plan was to include several NPCs, interactive objects, and a proper story that would last around five minutes. I also wanted to contrast the cat’s comfortable gated community with the city surrounding it. Unfortunately, I had to cut most of those ideas to finish the project on time.

Instead of giving up and submitting nothing, I decided to scale the scope down as much as possible. The result was a very short game where the cat buys a soda and bullies a minimum-wage worker.

The Conclusion

It’s far from a great game, but I genuinely enjoyed making it and learned a lot along the way. More importantly, I now have a solid foundation that I can build on for future Defold projects.