A Flawless World of Cats

As we’ll soon be back to working on The Flawless: Art’s Tale we decided it would be a good time to go into more detail about its world and lore. Recently, most of our attention has been focused on our retro space shooter, Super Mega Space Blaster Special. We’ve been working into the early hours developing the game, fixing bugs, and adding features based on player feedback to create a really fun experience that has gained some great review scores. We’ve still been cramming the odd hour here and there into the development of our much bigger console metroidvania action-RPG, The Flawless: Art’s Tale. Soon we’ll be going back into full time development on the project. In Ste’s recent interview with Foundat.io he talks about the cat world in The Flawless and we thought it best to expand a little on what was said.

The game, The Flawless: Art’s Tale was created around a central question; “Why do cat’s sleep so much?”. They sleep for 50-70% of their lives. This is a lot when compared to humans who sleep only 25-40% of their lives. After a little thinking we came up with the notion that cats must go somewhere they like when they sleep. This quickly snowballed into another world or dimension separate from the human world.

 

We toyed with the idea of a fun, beautiful world, where everyone is happy, that’s where they’d go to, right? Wrong, or at least in our opinion. Cats are predators, they love hunting, they love fighting, they are quite brutal creatures who have a soft side. We decided to create a world in their image. ‘Typha’ was born, a surreal feline world that is brutal, but with a soft side. A world where cats go to when they sleep, a world with rulers and lore similar to ours but overall very different, quite surreal, and very feline.

The Flawless: Art’s Tale: Early Development Trailer

A Human in a Cat World

We didn’t want the central character to be a cat, they would understand Typha, the cat world, too well. We wanted the player to be able to empathise with the main character. After some thought we decided the best way to do this would be to make the player character a human, so they would be experiencing the world for the first time along with the player. So we came up with concept of ‘The Flawless’. The Flawless (fur and clawless) are a very small number of people who can travel to the cat world with their cats when sleeping. The player character, Art, is a Flawless. Even though he has never set foot in Typha, he has observed the cat world from above in a ramshackle airship ever night with his pet cat, Mr Dirty Paws.

Art, The Flawless, stands at the begining of a huge adventure in the cat world, Typha

One stormy night whilst flying over Typha a giant red beam penetrates the clouds and hits the airship. It disintegrates around them and they start hurtling toward the forest below. As Art pulls his parachute Dirty Paws jolts from his grasp and they are separated. The trees quickly fill Art’s vision and he passes out and does not regain consciousness for a long, unknown period of time.

Art awakens in the surreal cat world that is Typha

Your Adventure Awaits

When Art finally awakens he is lying in a strange contraption, trapped by a glowing red electric fence and seemingly held captive by a flying robot. Dirty Paws is nowhere to be seen. He quickly realises that there is no colour in the world any more except for the glowing blue eyes of the robot and the red of the fence. All is not as it seems though. Art is catapulted into an extraordinary adventure, aided by his flying droid sidekick, FT. In the game he will search for his pet cat, attempt to bring colour back to the feline world, save kidnapped kittens, and uncover a dark plot which could lead to the end of both the human and cat worlds alike.

Art and his sidekick droid, FT, rescuing a caged kitten

Inspired by games like Cuphead we decided to create a hand-drawn isometric world map for the player to explore. This world map will serve as a central hub to the story with areas unlocking as certain tasks are completed. The player will be able to meet cats on the world map. They’ll be able to chat with them to further develop the story.

Flawless Art, wondering over to Fishercat Fin on the world-map to do a spot of fishing

There’s a lot more for us to tell you about The Flawless: Art’s Tale. We’ll keep bringing you updates about the game’s development along with more information about the story and cat world (Typha) over the coming months. Right now I’ve got to get back to helping Ste finishing-up our feature-packed retro space shooter, Super Mega Space Blaster Special Turbo for Nintendo Switch™, PS4™, Xbox One and Steam.

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Tony Leavy is a director and writer at Bare Knuckle Development. When Tony isn’t writing plots for BKD games or articles for our blog she can be found travelling the world taking amazing photographs. She is also passionate about education and using video games to make education more inclusive and a more motivating experience.

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