#feliquest

[feliquest]

With our demo well on its way, it's time for the team to move onto our next crucial step: raising funds for the project. As a three person team consisting of a college student and two disabled young adults, most of the funding for Feliquest will have to come from external sources. This raised money will go towards making ourselves more official, ei. consulting with lawyers, setting up trademarks and copyrights, and helping with the costs to host the site and hire team members like artists, programmers, and moderators. 

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Until we feel like we're in a position to be able to successfully host a kickstarter, we've decided to turn to Patreon for some early funding. Patron is a subscription service that will give us some monthly income for the game, and we'll be offering different tiers with different content- for example, 1$ a month will give you a smaller reward, 5$ a larger reward, and so on.

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But, that brings us to this week's post- we're not entirely sure what to offer our supporters. What would you guys be most interested in? We believe that community feedback on this matter is incredibly important, and we want to give back to those people who want to help our project succeed. In the meantime, we're happy to listen to everyone's thoughts. No idea is necessarily a bad one!

And in the meantime - enjoy this sketch of a potential pose for the standard body type with short fur!

[feliquest]

Introducing - Feliquest!

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Feliquest is an upcoming browser-based game focused on building your own clowder of genetically accurate feral cats. Featuring gorgeous habitats to explore and build your home in, an expansive tile-based patrol system, a setting with its own rich lore, and helpful NPCs to guide your paws. Feliquest aims for a fun, casual gameplay experience and a friendly, inclusive community of people to interact with.

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This project is being developed by Cryptofelis Studios, a three person team consisting of our head programmer, Avery, head artist, Trey, and publicist, Quinn. Currently only a few months in development, our current focus is setting up a cat creator demo featuring a few of the colors and markings that will be available on launch. While the demo will be in a slightly different style than the official game art for now, it will allow us to get a head start on designing our layering system and better figuring out our code, as well as additionally giving you something fun to play with as we work! Above is a better, albeit still early, example of what the final art will resemble, a more stylized look with softer lines.

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If you’d like to support this game, the most helpful thing to do right now is just spread the word- while we plan to host a kickstarter eventually, we aren't quite ready to do that yet- we'd like to set a few more things up first, and until then, building interest is most important. So, share us around! Likes, comments, and shares will help us build our community in preparation for fundraising, feedback polls, and interest checks for potential features. Check out our linktree for our other socials and join discord server!

[feliquest]

Today, we’d like to introduce three of our four available body types. The fourth, substantial, exists outside of this long-and-angular to short-and-round spectrum, and will be a kickstarter exclusive, so we’ve chosen not to include it in this post.

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In the center we have the standard, intermediate build seen in most domestic cats. To the left is what is officially recognized as the ‘foreign’ build, a term we don’t plan to use due to the potential for uncomfortable connotations. Cats of this build have long legs, a slender shape, roman noses, and large ears. This build is seen in breeds such as the oriental shorthair, modern-type siamese, peterbalds, and javanese. To the left is cobby, a build with rounded features, small ears, and slightly flattened faces. Feliquest will not be featuring the ultra-flat ‘peke’ faces seen in some cats, and will be staying more in the ‘doll face’ range. This build can be seen in breeds like the british shorthair, scottish straight, exotic shorthair, and persians.

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And, as you may have noticed, the profile headshots have been done in a slightly different style than usual. That’s because these were sketched by our team’s new volunteer artist, @Elkriens! Trey has been having an increasing amount of technical problems with their computer and tablet and a decreasing amount of motivation to do art, and thus will be shifting to more of a creative director and writer role on the team. While we plan to hire a paid artist as soon as it’s within budget, it simply isn’t right now, and we’re extremely grateful to Elk for helping us out as we prepare for the patreon.

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Feel free to leave suggestions for the long™ body type in the comments, and please give Elk a warm welcome to the team!

[feliquest]

Over the course of gameplay, players will encounter a variety of NPCs. These characters will run shops, offer services, and generally help players around the site. Today we are introducing Beep, the tutorial NPC.

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In-game, Beep will help you get started playing the game- a helpful and upbeat little kitten, he's eager to show you the ropes and introduce you to the other NPCs of the game. Additionally, if you need more guidance, he's more than happy to be on call to restate tutorial lessons or give useful gameplay tips.

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Can you guess what his phenotype is? (And yes - the white on his chest is in the shape of a heart when viewed from the front.)

[feliquest]

Feliquest is pleased to announce that our head artist has completed all the files needed for our cat creator demo!  In celebration of that, here’s a little post introducing it.

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Version one of the cat demo features some basic genes, but does not reflect the final art style for the site. This is essentially an early preview of what we can do and a loose guideline for what to expect from the game. Some things will change - for example, the full game will feature two different spotted tabby layers depending on if the cat is mackerel or classic tabby, and we will be switching to the most recent information regarding the ticked tabby system. Cat genetics are constantly changing, new discoveries are being made and old knowledge is being rehashed and expanded on - we aim to reflect that in Feliquest.

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The demo will include black, chocolate, cinnamon, and red coat colors, as well as the dilute gene which can be used to create blue, lilac, fawn, and cream. Tortoiseshell will be available as well, with the patterning changing depending on the amount of white spotting the cat has just like in real cats! Classic tabby, broken classic tabby, mackerel tabby, broken mackerel tabby, spotted tabby, heterozygous ticked tabby, and homozygous ticked tabby will be available, and a wider selection of tabbies will be featured in the end game. Ten different levels of white spotting will be available, ranging from mittens and a white chin to dominant white covering the entire cat. Colorpoint, mink, sepia, silver, and smoke will be featured as well. These traits can be combined to produce a total of 8,962 unique phenotypes!

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While the files are all complete, our programmer is still in the process of coding the demo, a process we hope to have finished by the end of April. In the meantime - can you guess what phenotypes these cats are?