Messaged Valve on Thursday to ask if it's okay to change the name of my game just before Next Fest. They immediately replied: Yeah, we can do that. I asked them to change it... Still waiting. Stressful!

Ronja likes it without the ...

I like how this looks...

Reddit has voted to call the game Find Matt’s Cats, just a little bit higher than my idea of Matt's Scattered Cats. Thoughts?

Matt Shatted Cats

"Matt's Hidden Pets" feels like an easy swap, but a lot of game dialogue would need to change... hmm...

If we immediately change our game's name we won't have to delay the launch. Valve says they can change it. Just gotta find the perfect name. Considering "Matt's Scattered Cats".

If I end up renaming Matt's Hidden Cats again, what are the best names? The genre is hidden-object and the story is about Matt, so Matt and Hidden need to stay in the title.

I've just been informed that NukeArts has recently trademarked the name "Hidden Cats" despite multiple developers using it for several years. This is going to cause a lot of headaches for developers, including me.

Totally forgot Natalie is in a game called Solace Inc. I better go play it...

Mhc drawing mod #epicbattlefantasy

I really enjoyed Midnight Gospel by Adventure Time guy. I think you need to have some spiritual experience to appreciate it though.

Adding another batch of fan art to the game. I think artists have a clear favourite character... (blurred it on purpose. you have to play the game.)

I wonder if anyone is gonna compile a list of all the references in Matt's Hidden Cats when the game is out. I think it's gonna be a pretty big list with some fairly obscure stuff in there too. And I'll probably add more after launch as I think of appealing objects.

The average person plays the Matt's Hidden Cats Demo for 2:30 hours! I think that's pretty good.

I really shouldn't be starting a new hobby when I'm already so busy. I'm also not very good at this new hobby, but what the hell. #ebf #clay

Here's some historical artifacts from Matt's Hidden Cats. Each biome is vaguely based on a different part of the world.

You can tell when I'm actually busy promoting Matt's Hidden Cats and when I'm not.

My code is so bad that three Chinese question marks would cause an infinite loop and crash it.

Midnight drawing session. Remembered some very important items to add to the game.

Update: managed to cut 21mb off the music files today without losing quality.

Cleaning up the filesize in Matt's Hidden Cats. Here's a breakdown of what's taking up space: Ruffle (launcher) = 25mb .swf file = 204mb Music + Ambience = 160mb Sound effects = 16.5mb Graphics + Misc = 10mb Art Gallery = 9.4mb Actionscript = 5.7mb Fonts = 2mb (mostly CJK)

Reduced the game filesize by 15 MB, down to 205 MB. But... at what cost?

Deleted a texture that I thought wasn't being used and thus created this monstrosity.

Here's an assortment of BROWN animals for Matt's Hidden Cats.

A lot of people thought that I can't get food delivered. I can, I just think it's too lazy and bad value, so I won't do it out of stubbornness.

Turns out a LOT of the UI motion tweens were not cleaned up correctly in Matt's Hidden Cats. References to tweens would reference UI elements and none of it would get garbage collected. Game got choppier after a few hours of playing.

A cool feature in Flash is the "size report" which tells you exactly how many bytes every single sound effect, bitmap, vector asset, font, and piece of code adds to your final filesize. Sometimes you'll find assets that take up a few megabytes for no good reason. "silence.mp3" adds 150kbs.

You can spend ages looking for a memory leak only to find out it's caused by something really mundane. In EBF4 it was status effect icons never being fully deleted. In Matt's Hidden Cats... it seems to be the dialogue scenes.

My Reddit account is 11 years old - they should just assume I'm an adult and not ask for proof!

Matt's Hidden Cats contains a lot of plants and video games!

I love fixing easy bugs and hate fixing hard bugs!

Happy Valentines! (learn how to not get dementia) www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJm5...

Darn, I want pizza this Friday night, but Ronja has taken the car. I guess I better eat something else, since it's impossible to get pizza any other way.

First 24 hours of posting on Reddit: I have gained 1,150 karma and 200 wishlists. Seems worthwhile to keep at it until launch.

Reddit gets shit on a lot, but it's actually really wholesome to interact with people with posts longer than a sentence. This is the technology we need to fight brain rot.

Tried making a catchy blog-style Reddit post about Matt's Hidden Cats - how does it look? www.reddit.com/r/IndieGamin...

Under apartheid South Africa, 95% of all people that received the death penalty were black. Under the law below, 100% of people receiving the death penalty would be Palestinian. This is just one of the reasons why Israel is viewed as an apartheid state by human rights organizations and UN experts.

Gonna try posting on Reddit.

Here's one of the biggest levels in Matt's Hidden Cats. This one will keep you busy for a while, so only a few are this large.

Mewgenics has a trailer in .swf format!!! (Flash file) www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/...

I hope that Matt's Hidden Cats is successful so that I can make some weird bonus levels for it. Got a lot of leftover ideas that would be quite chill to work on.

Make Art (1/4)

I've been enjoying following Coffeezilla's career progression. Starts off covering fairly minor YouTuber drama, gets popular investigating cryptocurrency scams, now interviewing congressmen about the Epstein files.

lol donald trump invaded venezuela and captured maduro all so that they’d stop sending oil to cuba and start sending it to israel jesus christ man its just too ridiculous

“Hey Mike, you heading to DICE or GDC this year?”

Holiday by Green Day came up in one of my VR rhythm games, and it's crazy listening to the song 20 years later and understanding the lyrics now.