pastrycats-teasers

[pastrycats-teasers]

Despite our silence, we’ve still been diligently working on the game! 100% focused on prototyping, to ensure the mechanics are fun and satisfying to play with. I’m slowly writing a blog post about our prototyping travails actually (brings me clarity).

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Trying to capture the egg-cat’s sense of wonder! Two from purchased references to prepare for the final pose.

I discovered I’d left ample empty space on the page in which I’d sketched the PastryCats logo, so now the sketches room together!

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We’ve been playing board games online… for research, yeah. Bountiful bundles of mechanisms to crib! Ark Nova has been a delight three games in (even just to chill and build our dream zoos when our cards lack synergy), buuut we honestly prefer cooperative games. It’s hard for us to deliberately sabotage the other, y’know?

Side note: activity on here might stretch to biweekly (or sparser), as I find it weirdly stressful to do social things. (Yes, even on a tiny blog I haven’t promoted anywhere…)

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Egg cat art (v2) before I decide to redo it (again)

I’m still not feeling it!—tone-wise, aesthetically. The sleek shapes and colors remind me of a spaceship-shark hybrid.

(Image is cut off due to pasting in a separate Procreate document, and Procreate abhors mismatched document dimensions.)

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Thinking about pastry cat skills again.

resting—think "resting the dough" and its opposite "restless." This skill describes patience and perhaps even stealth when hunting (which is more of an activity than a simple skill). Then again, resting can also be considered an activity in which the structure of the picat develops—so could be aging faster, allowing taste to develop, or the trigger for producing harvestables. So this one's about self-care and self-development.

prepping—more baker than feline. This skill involves being orderly, prepared, and precise. Planning for the long term.

kneading—perfect thematic link between cats and pastries. This skill is about manipulation with the paws and revolves around acts of nurturing, creation, and shaping. Like the milk treading in kittenhood.

foraging—scrounging for treats or items. Somewhere in-between manipulation with paws and harvesting—more of an instinct. Press, pin, ply—some moves for them to hone with foraging puzzles.

harvesting?—but is this more of an activity, such as hunting? I imagine that harvesting (as opposed to foraging for food or items) requires knowledge and experience of the particularities of various picat breeds. Or perhaps "harvesting" can stand in for all intellectual skills (think acquisition of knowledge).

To be further prototyped...

[pastrycats-teasers]

Cats! Pose studies for the egg cat

As you can see from the notes, I’m not 100% thrilled with how I render forms. I must do more volume studies!

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Pet sims & competitions/battles—we love the thrill, the glory, and the profits. But what’s the in-universe purpose of competitions? I’ve been thinking about meaningfully connecting each game feature of PastryCats to the world and lore.

Not every pet is built for a competitive life. There should be plentiful vocations that speak to other souls… delighting patrons in a cat cafe?

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Concept art for the "egg cat" (proper name pending!) breed

My design notes-to-self:

a golden head suspended in an egg jelly, like the globular helmet of an astronaut—explorative, curious

each ear a large concave fragment of egg shell

skin like molten lava, encased in smooth egg shell, whose edges are rounded and nibbly

a gravity-defying tail encircling the body

Design work on this breed spans months back—I can see I had a weaker grasp on cat anatomy in the original pencil sketch.

Bottom-right corner is the partial sketch for the final artwork, until I decided I'm finishing it on its own canvas.

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✨Pastry constellation✨

Ingredient substitutes will be a thing down the line! (Make your pastries vegan!)

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Gotta draw a lot of cats!

Practicing sketching fast & loose. Neat trick to getting faster: realize you don’t have all the time in the world.

[pastrycats-teasers]

PastryCats ~Teaser~ Blog

Hey there~ We’re baking PastryCats, an upcoming browser-based sim & pet site featuring pastry-inspired, cat-like beings set in a whimsical, bakery-themed universe!

This is our sideblog—follow us for semi-regular doodles and ramblings*

Want more substance? Our blog’s devlogs are chunky!

We toot on Mastodon—gifs too

We have a waitlist of ~150—join us! Reserve your bakery 🐾🧁

Our main blog is at pastrycats-game, but it’s totally empty (want to finish painting the cocoa-cozy header art first!)

*we mean it: unflashy and unhelpful and more of a way to check our pulse