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So a huge part of my life these past couple years has been Kitty Arcade. This is a scrappy little startup that I’m super fucking proud of.
We raised our first $200k back in December 2020, eventually raising a grand total of $600k.
Win or lose in the end, I’m quite proud that I’ve managed to keep our team working for 2 years on a $600k investment.
In 2 years we’ve built lots of cool shit. Just look at this:
youtu.be
We made a fully functioning, 1v1, multiplayer, tablet based fighting game that cats could play.
It’s insanely cool. This footage was from a shoot we did in November of 2021. We were preparing to launch the tablet game. But if you look closely at the footage, it’s pretty easy to see there were some problems. We were struggling to get cats to play in a way that felt meaningful. This was such a struggle that we literally had to pay Hollywood trainers to work with professional cats (yes, that’s a thing) to engineer this footage. It wasn’t authentic.
Fast forward to today:
youtube.com
Obviously, we’ve made some big changes. The cats are stoked because we’re leaning into their natural play behavior by introducing a physical toy – the world’s first “Kitty Controller,” a cat toy that connects to our game via bluetooth, translating kitty swats and swipes into game inputs.
In the next like THREE months, I have to get people excited enough about this thing to keep us in business. I have to create enough of a conversation around Kitty Arcade that the public's support of the project will allow us to continue.
To do this I’m going to talk about Kitty Arcade everywhere I can, every single day, for the next 3 months. To my followers that will undoubtedly find this insufferable - I apologize. But please stick around and support me on this journey to grow Kitty Arcade’s following to 10,000 + so that we feel we can find success when we launch our Kickstarter later this year.
Kitty Arcade was started on this silly idea that we could make games for cats and the content it would enable would be hilarious and awesome. It was started on the dream of “Kitty Esports” and the amazing show we could make to crown the first Kitty Champion. And it was started in this shared love of our pets and the idea that we already play together and that maybe we could make that play experience more special and more fun by combining it with something else we love - videogames.
My team has worked passionately on this project and has taken the idea of “video games for cats” unbelievably far. No one has spent more time playing with cats, or working to better understand cat play behavior than this combined group of experts. We’re talking about thousands of hours spent playing with hundreds of cats over the last two years.
What we have come up with is, in our opinion, undoubtedly the way that Kitty is most excited to play. And we really believe that we’ve done an adequate job of turning Kitty Arcade into a play experience that people can get excited about too.
My ambition is to create a platform where pet lovers can gather, compete, play with, share and celebrate our pets. Yes, our games are silly, and absolutely, we will encourage people to purchase some of our crazy products, but ultimately we think it will be fun and good.
And we will pledge to be fun and good also. We will do our best to make fun and good content that serves our community. And we will give back everywhere we can – to our players by funding special events and prizes, to our community by working with shelters to help pets get the care they need and to get adopted, and to ultimately tell a good and pure story about how important it is that we all spend a little time every day playing with our pets.
Over the next 60 days we will be posting content, every day, showing off what we’ve been working on for these past 2 years. And in March, with the end of our runway upon us, we will Kickstart, and hopefully, successfully launch the greatest video game for cats ever made.
 
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Papua New Guinea1059 Posts
A little blunt but it seems like it's not a game for cats but a platform for cat people to exploit their pets for internet points?
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On January 04 2023 05:31 HornyHerring wrote:
A little blunt but it seems like it's not a game for cats but a platform for cat people to exploit their pets for internet points?
oof! That's certainly not the vibe we want to be giving.
Truth is it started as kind of a funny idea - if cats could play games we could make hilarious esports content.
And the more we worked on it, the more we started to believe it was awesome.
Ultimately, we've spent the last couple years trying to make something good and fun. These next couple months are our last big push.
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What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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The internet is honest and just.
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Hyrule19257 Posts
On January 20 2023 10:42 Weird wrote:
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
A simple no would have sufficed...
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The following is an attempt to communicate my inner thoughts are a confused member of the public to hopefully provide you with some useful information, not to put you down, because I admire your efforts:
You keep talking about games but what is the game about?
(For example, in SC we collect money, to build stuff and kill the enemy.)
I watched some of your videos and it seems like the cat is hitting some toy and it translates into points in the AR view. Am I missing something? Because that doesn't seem like an interesting game if that is all
I think what you've made is technically amazing but you should consider expanding its application.... like why are you limiting it to cats?
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On January 31 2023 23:06 JieXian wrote:
The following is an attempt to communicate my inner thoughts are a confused member of the public to hopefully provide you with some useful information, not to put you down, because I admire your efforts:
You keep talking about games but what is the game about?
(For example, in SC we collect money, to build stuff and kill the enemy.)
I watched some of your videos and it seems like the cat is hitting some toy and it translates into points in the AR view. Am I missing something? Because that doesn't seem like an interesting game if that is all
I think what you've made is technically amazing but you should consider expanding its application.... like why are you limiting it to cats?
Thank you for a great question!
First of all, the business hypothesis is that video games with our pets is fun and good and that we should all be down to try it. We have some really exciting ideas for dog games, and the sick nerd baller dream is Cats vs Dogs Esports World Championship.
But we have to crawl first - we started here because of what we already knew about cats -
They’re already the 2nd most likely species on earth to play and enjoy video games! We know this because tablet games for cats literally have millions of downloads and there are plenty of cute videos of kitties playing them online.
We wanted to take the “joke” to its absolute extreme. Let’s create the worlds best video game for cats. In our testing, cats preferred playing with toys over playing with tablets. “Why not create a kitty controller” We asked?
It’s a toy that cats love and that intersects with the game. Every time kitty bats at the toy, we get an input in game.
Using this basic idea, we can design simple 1 and 2 button games for humans and cats to play together.
Theoretically we could design infinite games with infinitely more complex systems. The toy is basically an Xbox for cats.
🤣
I hope this makes sense and answers your question. 🙏
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Building on “what is this game about?”
Well, think of it like Mario Party. Lots of fun mini games to try. We have a racing game where your kitty rides a mighty pug steed around a track against opponents. When kitty hits the controller, he’ll spank the pugs booty, causing them to go faster.
We also have fishing, and a 1v1 magic duel game mode, and many more that we hope to make one day.
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Thanks for your explanation. I think the cats aren't aware that they are playing a game (since it's happening in AR on your phone) but they're just knocking on the "controllers" as far as they are aware right?
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On February 02 2023 11:03 JieXian wrote:
Thanks for your explanation. I think the cats aren't aware that they are playing a game (since it's happening in AR on your phone) but they're just knocking on the "controllers" as far as they are aware right?
Yes, of course this is correct.
To kitty its just play time with their human and (hopefully) their favorite toy.
Edit: in other words, the toy is what we’ve really made for cats. The game is meant to be a fun way to encourage kitty play time for people.
Now you can say “my cat is better than yours” and you can prove it! 🤣
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On February 02 2023 23:26 MrBitter wrote:Show nested quote +On February 02 2023 11:03 JieXian wrote:
Thanks for your explanation. I think the cats aren't aware that they are playing a game (since it's happening in AR on your phone) but they're just knocking on the "controllers" as far as they are aware right?
Edit: in other words, the toy is what we’ve really made for cats. The game is meant to be a fun way to encourage kitty play time for people.
ah ok this is a good point imo, thank you.
When you talked about games for cats I was under the impression that the cats were aware that they were playing a game, which was why I was underwhelmed when I watched the videos.
I'm having trouble being excited over this because I don't see the fun or attractiveness in this (I feel disconnected and underwhelmed because the cats are not aware of the game or competition), but I really want to find an angle to make it exciting for me and I hope you'll be able to keep making advancements, because I like the premise of cats/animals competing against each other and I see that you've produced your AR software already, which is something that I would imagine to be really difficult to achieve. (it's functional right?)
I don't know how reasonable this feature is to implement because it involves storing video, but it might be fun to have a "replay" connected to every score/submission, so people can watch how a high score was achieved and maybe share it, so people can admire the feat while they promote the game for you
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re: replay storing and sharing -
This is exactly the goal.
Ex: You decide to play some Pug racing with your cat and you get a new fast time. Now you can send that clip to your friend, challenging them to beat it.
They get to see the clip and try to beat the time, sending back the result.
We’re trying to create fun gameplay loops like this wherever possible.
Thanks for all your feedback. Ultimately this kind discussion is my goal!
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On February 03 2023 07:38 MrBitter wrote:
re: replay storing and sharing -
This is exactly the goal.
Ex: You decide to play some Pug racing with your cat and you get a new fast time. Now you can send that clip to your friend, challenging them to beat it.
They get to see the clip and try to beat the time, sending back the result.
We’re trying to create fun gameplay loops like this wherever possible.
Thanks for all your feedback. Ultimately this kind discussion is my goal!
This is a tough challenge imo and I wish you all the best. You're welcome
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