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Cat Notes
Cat Notes was developed as a submission for GIMERSIA Inpsire in late 2025, a student game jam hosted by EKRAF — Ministry of Creative Economy of Indonesia. The game jam featured a very straightforward theme, that is "Observe, Imitate, Modify". My team and I agreed to use Poti Poti Studio's "Is This Seat Taken? as a model for Cat Notes. The game is developed with Godot with me working as the game designer, narrative designer, and the music composer for the project. It is currently playable in itch.io for both Windows and MacOS.
Early Development
The first question that comes to mind during the early stages of development is what is the game going to be about? and what would make it unique to avoid becoming a ripoff of the model? To answer those questions, we needed to decide what aspects of the model game do we need to keep into our game and how we would change it. As a player, the core gameplay concept of Is This Seat Taken? is the spatial puzzle of managing the seats of highly picky (or not) characters in different settings. I find that there is also a sense of relatability with the characters' demands, which adds a layer of intrigue for the player. Moreover, those characters can have reappearances in later stages. These aspects of the game is what we wanted the players to also experience in our game.
The interplay between the narrative and the gameplay that is shown through the way that the dialogues of the characters serve as the "rules" of each stages has inspired me to do something similar with Cat Notes. What makes Cat Notes different, however, is the first-person perspective presentation. The player will play as "themselves", or more descriptively, an overly organized pet owner of multiple cats whom writes notes of the each cats' personality and preferences. Given the scenario, the game — similarly to Is This Seat Taken? — offers a spatial puzzle that must be solved by learning the cats' preferences which changes throughout the story. It is these preferences — which non-diegetically functions as rules of the stages — that the players get to know about their cats. The different rules per stage that reflects the changes in preferences can drive the progression of the story. With these things in mind, as the game designer and narrative designer of this project, I will consider the level design along with the story-writing as if it's one, which will cause an interesting relationship later on that affects the difficulty curve. We will bridge over onto that topic, but for now, we can proceed to the overall game design.
Cat Notes gameplay loop.
Cat Notes have a simple gameplay loop, and overall, the mechanics are highly intuitive and easy to understand. Because of this, the first-time user experience is optimized by simply letting the players figure it out themselves with the help of the audiovisual feedback such as animations and sound effects.
First-Time User Experience & Level Design
The first level is designed without any specific rules other than having to assign each one of the cats a sleeping spot. This prevents the player from information overload as well as introducing them to the simple act of dragging and dropping without an explicit verbal explanation.
After that introduction, the next level introduces some of the cats' preferences, which will grow in complexity on future stages such as cats' relationships with other cats, and rooms that they like or dislike. There is also a feature where player can alter environmental objects that can have certain effects to specific cats. One of the implemented example is how one cat has an affinity with watching television, but some cats despise it. Each introduction to new kinds of rules and mechanics takes time, which I consider by spacing it up by the amount of stages. That way, I let the players get used to the newly introduced mechanics before introducing a new one. On the contrary, I still need to balance it out since I still want to keep up player retention and not bore them by making it too repetitive.
Affinity between cats affecting their sleeping preferences.
Environment affecting sleeping preferences.
As previously mentioned, the approach of level designing and story-writing simultaneously causes an interesting dynamic in the way I design the difficulty curve. There are moments where the difficulty might spike up due to certain events in the story. Something like this happened when designing some of the later stages in the game. Essentially, the story will have a moment of resolve after the climax of the story, which causes the difficulty to be significantly easier than the previous one. Several aspects of the story that causes some cats to not appear in certain levels also have major effects on the difficulty curve since it can reduce the complexity of the puzzle. In order to solve this issue, I decided to add more complexity in the rules instead where one cat may have multiple specific preferences that clashes with the other. However, on the last couple levels — during the "moment of resolve" I mentioned earlier — I decided to embrace the decrease in difficulty as a way to synchronize the story cooling down with the players' experience with the difficulty as well.