Imagine this: you live in a dystopian world and you must travel through that world by running, jumping and climbing your way through an adventure. However, there's one caveat: you're a cat.
This is the premise of HK, a new indie game in development by Koola & Viv.
Koola & Viv has a development blog set up to keep potential fans informed about the game's development and has posted a lot of video and screen shots of HK in action. So far, the title seems pretty interesting, and definitely unique. It will also look great: the developers have turned to Unreal Engine 4 for its creation.
What's even more fascinating is that the French developers spent a lot of time studying cats and cat behavior so that the game becomes immersive for the human playing it. This occasionally proved challenging, though, as highlighted in the blog.
"I have spent a lot of time to have correct collision for the cat," one of the developers wrote. "Seeing that the character controller in Unreal 4 is mainly for biped, there was a lot to do to have the cat collided with the world without his head passes [sic] through walls or to have it walking on small surfaces without falling (it maybe seems easy but for me it was a real headache)."
Here are a few videos of the developer working on the cat's behavior:
The developer also posted an animated gif of the cat moving through a hallway.
It seems that the game will rely on the player using cat-like abilities to stealthily sneak around enemies and progress through levels. Considering the skills that cats have in their natural environment, HK could provide an entirely new kind of gameplay.
The dystopian game will not have a particular setting but does find inspiration from Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City.
Although the team has worked hard so far on HK, it's still pretty early in its development cycle. The developer doesn't expect a release for several more years, especially considering that the team only consists of two humans and two cats (the blog also admits that the cat in charge of communication isn't doing its job very well).
