The four things behind Cat Colony

Hey, I’m Fedor, lead game designer at Hex-a-gon. Nikola already walked you through how the colony runs under the hood, so I’ll take the design side. There are four things we hold nearly every Cat Colony decision up against, and each one is getting its own devlog later. This is the overview.

The colony doesn’t wait for you

The colony should feel like it’s carrying on whether you’re watching or not. Cats acting on their own reasons, small moments none of us placed by hand, a cat you never gave an instruction to wandering over to flop in a patch of sun. The quiet rule is that if you look closer, you’ll usually catch something you’d have missed.

We could fake most of that. Write a handful of nice beats, fire them on cue, keep tight control over when they land. It’s the safe way to build this, and we mostly don’t, because a scripted moment plays the same every time and after a while you feel the seams. So instead we set the conditions and step back. That’s what Nikola’s whole side of the project is for: hundreds of cats thinking and getting along at once, at 60fps. Put the phone down and the place keeps going.

Cats you can actually tell apart

A colony is only as good as the cats in it. Not one of them should be a cat you could swap for another without noticing.

The tempting shortcut is a big pile of cats that all behave the same way. That falls apart the moment you realize you’re not attached to any of them, and attachment only shows up when a cat reads as that cat and no other. So the moods, the preferences, who tolerates whom and who really doesn’t, it’s all doing one job: making this cat feel unlike the one beside it. Give it a week and you’ll have a favorite. You’ll feel it the first time they’re nowhere in sight.

A place that ends up yours

The colony is meant to be yours, not ours. Most of the fun is in shaping the space until it looks like something you made instead of something you picked off a shelf. Our rough test: sit two players down to describe their colonies and they should sound like they’re describing two different places.

The catch is that freedom and coherence pull against each other. Give people control over everything with nothing tying it together and the place turns to mush. So most of the work goes into the tools, into handing you real choices that still add up to one colony instead of a junk drawer. What you end up with should read as your taste, not a template.

Somewhere to relax

Under all of it, this is meant to be calm to play. Cozy, the way we use the word, isn’t thin and it isn’t simple. It means the game won’t punish you for taking your time, messing about, or drifting off to watch a cat sleep for a bit.

Cozy is the hardest of the four, and it isn’t close. You give up the usual levers. No timer, no way to lose. So whatever makes the game matter to you has to come from caring about the place rather than being scared of losing it.

What’s next

Over the next few devlogs I’ll take these one at a time and get into how each shapes the work: what it gets us to say yes to, and just as often, what it makes us cut.

See you then.