World 1 became a complete world today: two stages that end at a food bowl, a third that ends at a boss, and a map that ties them together.
The world map
An outdoor island overworld — sea, foam line, sand rim, grass with a tufted lip, and a cliff face that gives the land real thickness. Two ranks of horizon hills behind it.
A dirt road with corners, and the level nodes sit on those corners. Branch roads lead to the shops, each on its own spur rather than on the way to anywhere else. The tower stands on a raised plateau with its own cliff and a cast shadow at its foot.
Markers as specified: a red X through beaten stages, a small gold dot on available ones, a gate on locked ones. Gold appears nowhere else on the map, so the eye goes straight to where you can actually go.
Integration was verified by playing it, not by reading it: map to the first stage, completed, back to the map with it marked beaten and the next one opened.
Two earlier designs were rejected on the way — a side-on house cutaway and an overhead floor plan. Neither was ever asked for. Both were the wrong idea, pursued too long.
The boss is reachable, and finished
The third stage's goal is a door, not a bowl. Reaching it hands on to the boss arena, and the score, clock, secrets and both cats' lives carry across because nothing touches them.
Six co-op bugs came out of that fight alone. He could not see player two at all — never closed on him, never led a pounce at him. He damaged one cat while arbitrarily shielding the other. His defeat cutscene froze one cat and left the other running loose for six and a half seconds.
His health default was 1, against a phase formula that would have started him in his final phase and ended him in a single stomp. The cause was a hardcoded number inside the formula, and that is what got fixed rather than the symptom.
Two defects in the handoff itself: the back door opened on the frame of the last stomp, so a cat standing in the wrong spot ended the stage instantly and never saw the ending — and his intro bark had never once played, because it was announced before anything had subscribed to it.
His character is unchanged and protected. The tail wags in every frame, including the defeat, and he flops over and falls asleep rather than dying.
Three that were worth the trip
Unity's null check does not report an inactive object as null. Once a cat was benched, the game kept handing every prop a cat who was not playing. The survivor could not reach the goal, arm a checkpoint, or collect anything — and arming a checkpoint is the only way a benched cat comes back. A soft-lock built entirely out of one true-looking comparison.
Every enemy was shielding one cat. Contact damage returned after the first collider it found and armed one shared cooldown, so which cat took the hit was decided by collision order rather than by anything the players did.
All the art sat half a tile high. Tiled renderers were seated at a rect's centre while every sprite is pivoted at its base, so every wall and floor row overlapped the row above it — and the bottom half of every stack was never painted at all. It had been that way in all three levels since they were built.
Also fixed
The kill plane watched a single cached player, so the second cat could fall out of the bottom of the world forever, dragging the shared camera down after it.
The end-of-level tally needed 1.56 seconds to reveal its rows and accept input; the flow tore it down at 1.6 — destroyed a frame or two after its last row appeared, on every completed run in the game.
The all-secrets bonus paid three times, because secrets accumulated across the whole run while the target was per-stage.
Two thirds of the world ran with a frozen clock and no music: the flow ticked only a scene matched by name, and the audio service was being told to stop by every stage that did not match.