CLOUD CATS
CAT KYTHE JUDGEMENT SHMUP

This is not the very beginning but it is close. I had two other things that I thought for sure I would end up making before I made Cloud Cats, and they were Robot Germs and Versnoof, but Robot Germs never got out of my notebook (except I would breathlessly talk to Mike about it all the time and I really thought I would make it) and Versnoof I gave up on after I tried to learn Cocoa and it was so hard! PROGRAMMING IS FOR THE BIRDS I yelled and gave up and then un-gave up and starting making Cloud Cats.

Tiffany and I were in a band at the time called ELEPHANT KISS? and we sang a lot of songs about telepathic cats who were in love, so this was a shmup about telepathic in-love cats who would reach across space and time to hold hands and blast monsters (or maybe SAVE MONSTERS?? you could play as a pacifist, in the un-made imaginary finished version of the game).

I made barely playable prototypes of Cloud Cats a few times over. I made it in GameMaker 7, and then again in 8.1, and then a horribly broken version in GameMaker: Studio. This is the only artifact I have from when I was making it; I think everything else is on a broken hard drive I was foolish enough to rely on. It is a screenshot of an unlisted Youtube video I made for the devlog. It was classically overscoped, a proper First Game, where there would be like a bunch of Conducts the game was (invisibly) tracking and adjusting which enemies you saw or which places you visited with periodic announcements about how you were doing, but! it really was just a little bullet hell shmup where you could graze bullets to open portals and then if you blasted the portal it would do a big Yar's Revenge explosion. I was playing Ikaruga a lot and Perfect Cherry Blossom and Tumiki Fighters and I just really wanted to make a maximalist high concept cinematic twee shmup for the people. Every time I remade it I would think, "finally, I can begin to work on the game properly" but it never really got beyond a test level with a huge brontosaurus sprite that would say Cryptic Things (because I was watching Twin Peaks) and then shoot lasers at you. This isn't even a screenshot of THAT, the ultimate, almost finished, kind of fun engine for Cloud Cats; this is from earlier, when I was trying to draw fruit snack enemies so you could visit "Fruit Snack Patagonia", which was a song I wrote for a short-lived noise band, called THNDR LIZRAD. Rest in peace, Cloud Cats, I leave you with the lyrics to Fruit Snack Patagonia:

        I'm going to Fruit Snack Patagonia
        You can have you can have you can
        Have what I owe you

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