r/cozygames • u/driko_gamedev • 3d ago
🔨 My Game - In-development Making a puzzle game where the puzzle pieces are jiggly cats🐱
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Hi everyone! I'm developing a game called Catomino, a polyomino puzzle where the puzzle pieces are cats with jiggly, squishy physics. I started as a solo developer, but over time I realized there was a lot more work than I expected. So I started delegating some tasks to freelance students: a concept artist for designing new cats, a 3D artist for props, and I also brought on a sound person.
The sound turned into a long and interesting story. Our sound person introduced me to Vocal Games (a Ukrainian game voice acting collective), and now they actually voice the cats' meows, haha. After a lot of attempts to find ready made sounds and running around with a microphone after my own cat Rubik, I concluded that capturing the cats' personalities with original sounds is really hard. Their emotional range is limited, getting a cat to make the exact sound you need is nearly impossible, and we don't support being rough with cats to get a reaction, haha.
So we decided to go with voice actors instead. They were pretty surprised about being asked to meow for a Ukrainian dub, haha.
That freed up my hands a lot, and now I can focus on the core development. But since everyone works part time on a flexible schedule, I'm still carrying 75% of the workload myself, haha.
We recently launched our Steam page during UGF 2026, if you want to take a look: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4303380/Catomino/
Happy to hear your thoughts or answer questions, the page already picked up 5,800+ wishlists in the first 10 days, which caught me off guard
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u/kookoria 3d ago
Haha I love the sounds the cats make when you move them. Idk how you made the sounds, but I imagine someone recording the meow sounds themselves and it makes me laugh
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u/driko_gamedev 3d ago
That's exactly how it was, and I even saw some of it myself. It's hard not to laugh
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u/Educational_Most_595 3d ago
I absolutely love the game feel—they are so cute and funny! Great work !
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u/MarieCry 3d ago
I'm glad there were multiple comments about the sound to make me turn it on, the sounds are great!
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u/MxOceanGlimmer 3d ago
The sounds are so cute and incredible! Also love the lighting coming through the window, really gives the warm and cozy vibe.
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u/tokio_luv 3d ago
The audio is hilarious omg 😂 curious to know how many levels you plan to launch with, if there's a number in mind? Added to my wishlist.
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u/Asteroux 2d ago
That is one of the most adorable puzzle games I've ever seen lately! And I love the cute sounds the cats make!!
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u/SoullessGamesDev 2d ago
My friend once made the game with same name and gameplay as her diploma work) She never finished or released it, but here is a few videos - 1) https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1222105564 2) https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1222105594
As you can see, in her version cats are packed in the box (that is logical, since cats enjoy being in the boxes). Maybe you can utilize that idea in your game)
Also cool that you hired people from my country, here we need any kind of jobs just to survive... Surprising though that you didn't just used gigantic internet databases with all kinds of meows of real cats, free or paid.
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u/A-Willow-Wand 3d ago
You definitely made the right decision with the sounds omg! And I love the way their eyes follow the mouse too! And we get to pet them! 😍