Cat Overlord reached the milestone that matters most in a new game: you can play the whole thing. Charm people for treats, spend the treats recruiting animals, send your squad at the dogs, take a block, hold it, and eventually beat the mayor's dog and win the run.
It is early, and it looks it. Every character on screen is still a placeholder shape. That was on purpose, and it is worth explaining why.
Fun first, faces later
The open question about this game was never whether a cat could be drawn. It was whether charming a passer-by, spending what they give you on a pigeon, and sending that pigeon at a dog is something anyone wants to do twice.
A game that looks finished gets judged as though it is finished — by players, and much more dangerously by the people making it. Art makes a design harder to change and harder to be honest about. So the rule for this stretch was simple: nothing that is not a mechanic.
It cost something. With no animation and no art, the game had to find other ways to tell you what is going on, which is why colour does so much work in the current build and why a human visibly changes colour as they warm to you. Those will stay when the art arrives — they turned out to be good design rather than scaffolding.
The decision the whole game rests on
There are no experience points in Cat Overlord. Defeating an enemy gives you nothing at all.
Treats are the only currency, and they come from exactly two places: charming humans, and holding ground. They are also what you spend on healing yourself, recruiting allies and buying upgrades.
Three things follow from that, and all three are why it stays. There is nothing to farm, so no one can grind their way past a difficult stretch. Getting stronger requires doing the thing the game is actually about — going out among people and taking territory. And because one currency pays for everything, every purchase is a decision about what you are choosing not to buy. Healing yourself now is a recruit you will not have later.
A day that changes what you should be doing
A full day and night cycle runs about four minutes. By day the streets are busy, people are easily charmed, and the dogs are only half watching. After dark almost everyone has gone home, charm barely works, and the dogs can see you coming from much further off.
So the rhythm of a run has a shape to it: earn by day, conquer by night. And the humans who genuinely adore you are the ones still out on the street with you at three in the morning, which is a nicer piece of storytelling than anything we could have written down.
What is next
Art and animation. The cat, the squad, the dogs, the humans and the street. This is the next milestone and by far the largest.
Sound. There is none yet. A game about a city at night should be heard.
More districts. One block proves the loop. The game wants a city.
Saving a run, so an empire can survive being switched off.