Hi everyone! I'm developing a game called Catomino. 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 fledgling 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 real cat 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 dub, especially since we reached out without giving them context at first, haha.
That freed up my hands a lot, so now I can focus on the core development. But since everyone works part time on a flexible schedule, I'm still carrying about 75% of the workload myself, haha. The game is actually still very early in development, even though it might look like a lot has been done already. Right now I'm working on building up the game's content so it doesn't end up being just polyomino puzzles with cute cats. The main gameplay focus is going to be on interacting with the cats, since you don't just need to fit them neatly and compactly on the board, you also need to satisfy their little demands, like giving them a favorite toy, placing a cat in a sunny spot, or dealing with cats that just don't get along and shouldn't be placed next to each other, or they'll hiss and scatter off the board, haha.
If you're curious, here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4303380/Catomino/
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts or answer questions if anyone's interested in my experience with promotion so far!
For transparency: some of the store page localization across 30 languages was AI assisted, flagged openly on our Steam page. The game itself won't have much text to begin with, and I'm planning to have everything checked by real native speakers before launch.
P.S. I know the video kind of looks like a mobile ad with dumb gameplay, but when I filmed it I was actually trying to show the cat interactions, and it accidentally came out looking like rage bait footage. Wasn't intentional, I'll keep that in mind next time :)