Posted November 28, 2025 by PopSplash Games
#miru #cython cat #devlog #cat game #release #plans #next game
Around 3 years ago, I met TinyVoid on a discord server talking about life's problems. We realised our common love for games like Hollow Knight and Sonic, and somehow it clicked. We wanted to create a game that combined Sonic's speedy platforming and Hollow Knight's combat and metroidvania style. It was the perfect match, he was good at art, and I was good at programming. While I already had some decent experience in the gamedev field, this was pretty new to TinyVoid, as he spent a lot of the time creating standalone art in non-gamedev fields. While there was great challenge initially in getting accustomed to Unity, GitHub and the entire project workflow, it was like a snowball down the hill. He learnt it pretty quickly and was able to handle level design like a pro, especially Jungle Temple, which is a masterpiece to my eyes. We always thought big and wanted to make something legendary.
It turns out that we made a number of mistakes which made this project extremely difficult to push forward.
The first and foremost was PLANNING. Our GDD was a forgotten mess and our scope was too large without enough details written down, and many of the times we would say that we'll figure it out later, but then forgot what was that about. I have to confess, I completely forgot about our Trello board and started to work off my memory and discord chats and pins. TinyVoid had to remind me many times about features to implement. The scope was too large to maintain some clarity and consistent progress. Apart from that I was personally unable to maintain a constant workflow due to dealing with college life and had to rely on the semester break holidays to carry out most of the heavy work.
The initial scope was to have many open worlds with portal(bonus) levels within them. However we didnt realise the complexity we were dealing with and decided to cut down to a single open world with a single portal level. It is also the reason why the game is being released for free, as we dont consider this worth commercializing. Me and TinyVoid often had conflicting ideas for the game, and this was partly because of the bad planning, but also because there was not enough clarity on what we wanted to build. Because of leaving so much to abstraction, there was no rigid basis set which could have been used a guide to follow upon. I'm however happy that we managed to include a bossfight in the openworld since that helps make the game feel more complete.
The problem with combining Hollow Knight and Sonic was the vast difference in their world design and mechanics. Sonic has slopes and loop-de-loops with variety of platforming mechanics with acceleration based physics, whereas Hollow Knight was more block based with straight platforms, slow and methodic movement focused on combat and exploration. The openworld area that we created tried to combine both these things but it turned out to be quite a mess. The world encourages you to be speedy and move around fast, while at the same trying to stop you from enjoying that and make you explore and fight enemies out of nowhere. This continous disconnection and flow cutting lead to a really frustrating experience, and blaming it on the character not adapting to the design, I spent months trying to adjust parameters and "fix" Miru and realised the mistake too late. However I'd like to say that Jungle Temple was done right atleast, courtesy of TinyVoid's idea of making portal levels, where the goal was not combat or exploration, but speedrunning, escaping traps and getting the highest score. The level design was more consistent and smooth, without obstructing the gameplay flow.
The game would have released a year back, but clearly it was not ready and it took us another year of bugfixes and improvements to really complete it, however I'd like to say that we honestly believe the game is now more of a DEMO, simply because we had such high plans for it. The initial plan for release was 24th Nov, however something unexpected changed that. As an experiment I tried using a platform for playtesting. But I was completely amazed at the results! The testing was done as a video recording of them playing and talking about the game, which gave us real-time feedback and while we discovered a bunch of bugs, we also ended up discovering a ton of Quality-of-Life (QoL) issues that were kinda shocking almost. We felt kinda guilty about what we were making testers go through, since they had to play the game for atleast 30 mins, but we commend them for their effort! As a result, we decided to push back the release to 1st December as I set about fixing all of the issues discovered. I know it doesnt sound like a big deal for a game like this, but we know that the first impression of our audience matters, and we cant look lazy or detached just because our game is free (and sort of a fail). Below I'm sharing some of the fixes that we implemented, and yes I like to give detailed descriptions to my git commits. This was carried out in 3 days of focused work.
Here is a comparison of our game with a really old "Alpha" version that was 2 years ago.
Now that our little demo project is out of the way, we have started to focus on the next game, CYTHON CAT 2, or something like that, we havent decided on a name yet, but it's going to still be about Miru's adventures. Currently we are still in progress of making the GDD, and this time we are going to make sure that the GDD is extremely detailed, we will keep refining it until we reach a point where we feel that there is absolute clarity in what we want to create. Of course we aren't planning to spend time on the GDD forever but we need to make sure that we dont repeat the mistakes of our previous game. This project is going to be much bigger, with loads of content and play time, the main goal is to ensure continuous genuine fun and an engaging experience with a really cool story for Miru.
This time, the game is going to be divided into 2 types of levels which also means 2 modes of Miru, Combat Miru and Speedy Miru. There are levels that are dedicated to speedrunning and fast platform mechanics, and there are levels dedicated to combat and bossfights. This does not mean that the story will be disconnected, the campaign would follow a linear storyline and any of these levels may come in between. Miru wakes up in an unknown void world and needs to discover the mysteries of this place. These levels will be accessed by secret portals, and once you clear the levels and collect enough memory shards or similar pieces of mystery, it will allow you to unlock the bossfight arena to solve the mystery. Our main focus is quality over quantity, high replayability and a thrilling story.
As usual we are taking inspiration from the same games, which is Dark Souls, Hollow Knight and Ori Will of the Wisps for the combat and soulslike + metroidvania mechanics, along with Sonic Rush, Sonic Adventure 2 and many others for the platforming and speedy action-adventure gameplay. I'm also particularly taking interest in Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeons, as it may prove to be a useful option for making the combat based levels, which allows you to farm items pretty quickly and also features a bossfight in each dungeon.
This project is going to be one our most ambitious and challenging one ever done, and we are fully committed to making this dream come true. It's going to take a long while, but we are going to be disciplined and follow a schedule and work in a methodical and strategic manner so that the we dont go offtrack or start to lose motivation. No doubt it's going to be very difficult and I admit that I need to learn a lot more. I also want to thank you for reading this devlog, I hope it wasn't too messy to read, I'm really just writing off the top of my head here. If you do end up playing our game, we really would love to hear from you and get your input, we have a discord server already and will be providing regular updates from there. Once again I thank you for your support and being a part of our adventure.
Warm Regards,
Arjun
Team Cython Cat