A sound editor
The game now has a Sound Editor inside Unity. It lists all 163 sounds the game can make, grouped by what they are (movement, combat, water, catnip, Samus and so on). For each one it shows what the sound is, the exact lines of game code that trigger it, and the clips it plays, with a play button on every clip, so any interaction can be heard without playing the level. In Play mode a second button fires the sound through the running game, with its real volume and pitch variation.
Replacing a sound takes a drop or a click: drop a clip on it, import a file from anywhere on disk, add an extra variation for the game to rotate through, or restore the original. There is a volume slider and a box for describing what a sound should be instead. Ambience, music and sounds carried by individual objects, such as springs and checkpoints, have their own tabs.
The design choice that matters is that replacements are kept apart from the generated sounds. Rebuilding the audio, or re-running the sound generators, never undoes them, and "restore original" is just removing yours.
It was tested in the open editor: it compiles cleanly, the window draws with no errors, all 163 descriptions were read from the code, and a full replace and restore ran through the real audio builder. Clicking the buttons by hand and hearing the Play-mode button have not been tried yet.
The new look reaches Worlds 1, 2 and 3
The graphics overhaul is now in the real game. Tiles, backdrops, props, enemies and pickups are being replaced with better versions of themselves, drawn the way Razor and Blade were in Reign of Valtherin (modelled in 3D, baked down to pixel art). The levels keep their layouts. World 1 has its three stages and the laundry-room arena, World 2 has 89 new pieces, and World 3 has 46, including a cat carrier that World 6 shares. World 1's stage dressing is now placed too: 62 sprites, with 416 of 419 planned pieces in. The placement step skips any piece that would block a warp box's doorway or its prompt, or stand inside a wall, and a check of the built scene found no overlaps.
A bug worth knowing about: on 3 October the old art generators were re-run for the shading change, and they quietly put the old art back over 54 of World 1's new files. Stage 1-1 had been showing old backdrops and props since. They were found and restored, and the old generators now refuse to overwrite any file that holds the new art (335 files protected so far) unless told to on purpose. Later in the day, the new Samus and companions and the full set of warp box art went in as well.
The HUD changed so that hearts sit on the same row as the lives count, leaving room for player two's row directly underneath, and the yarn and paw counters moved to the bottom right.
Can every stage be finished?
The goal for the day was to stop trusting that the levels work and check. A scripted player, a step certifier that tries 536 different button patterns on every jump, and a lot of hand-driven tests through a virtual gamepad were pointed at the stages and the bosses.
- A climb. In one stage the tightest required steps were the two onto the middle rung, with a 0.17 second window for the air jump. Lowering the rung made it worse (one step fell to 0.07 s), so the rung was raised 0.2 units instead. Those two steps now have 0.23 s, and the step beyond gained a route with no air jump at all. All 43 authored steps in the stage still pass.
- A one unit hole in the floor where a hall joins a boss arena is closed.
- Gold stars at every stage start. The sparkle over the cat when a stage loaded was the first checkpoint arming under him. The first checkpoint now arms silently, and a real checkpoint later in a stage still flashes.
- Warp boxes. A partner who died was carried through the box and respawned at the old checkpoint, a passenger could land inside the floor, and the respawn came too early. All three are fixed and checked by a certifier that dives every box in the first world's stages (14 box ends).
- A chase. A cat killed in a boss's room could respawn inside the chasing wall of dogs and seal the corridor shut. The wall now stops a body length short of the respawn point (97.75 against a checkpoint at 98.5, before and after a death).
Several fights were played through with the player's own hairballs, claws and stomps, with the cat placed at the start of each fight, and the mechanics checked in play included the updraught (it throws a cat 3 units up), loose jar lids (they sink the cat to chest depth in about 3 seconds, and a hop gets out) and the warning shadow of a hand, which lasts exactly 0.60 s. Some links were forced rather than played, such as a boss's last health points taken through his own code, and a few timed moves cannot be reproduced on the test gamepad. The scripted player reached the goal in only three of the later stages, stalling elsewhere on things it cannot do (swimming, clawing out of sugar, rolling), so the later worlds still need a person with a controller. There were zero game errors in the console across all of it.
Every boss introduces himself
The first six bosses now each open with a short cutscene: black bars slide in, the camera finds the boss, a title card gives his name, and he shows what he is like, with one line in the lower bar saying how to beat him. The first, for instance, is hit by a real hairball and wobbles down onto his chin, exactly as in the fight.
The demonstrations are not animations made for the occasion. They run the boss's own fight code on the real objects in the room. The scene plays the first time you reach each boss on a save slot; if you have lost to him, you get a short version (bars, name, one line) when you go back in. Start or jump skips it at any moment, and skipping, pausing or leaving the stage can never leave the cat locked or the camera stuck. The cat cannot be hurt or moved during it. Every word on screen lives in one data file rather than in code, so the wording can be rewritten without a rebuild.
Three more bosses, in the last two worlds, got their own introductions later in the day. One of them is deliberately different: we kept his surprise, so his scene never says what he is.
Lessons from the first six:
- A cat riding Samus has his controls switched off, so the first version never noticed him walking in.
- A boss who walks or charges during his demonstration walked out of the shot, so the camera now stays on him.
- One boss is about eight units tall and the letterboxed view about six, so the camera frames her head and shoulders.
For one of the later bosses, the hairball thrown for his demonstration vanished the moment it left his hand, so he never fetched it. Reading the code found the cause: a ball still in the air is thrown away once it leaves the camera's view, and the scene's camera was close enough that it crossed that edge before landing. It is now thrown flatter and nearer, so it lands inside the view and slides.
Riding Samus plays exactly like Mittens
The complaint was that getting on Samus slowed Mittens down, and it was true. She accelerated and braked at about half his rate, jumped lower from a standstill, had no double jump and no roll, and the hairball button was taken over by her grab.
Samus now runs on Mittens' own movement numbers, read from the very same settings he uses, so the two can never drift apart. Acceleration, braking, walk and run speed, jump heights, gravity, coyote time and the jump buffer are all his, and she has his double jump and dodge roll with the same distance, speed curve, invulnerable window and cooldown. Fetch and hurl stay. The west button now does all three jobs without a mode: tap it with something in her mouth to hurl it, tap it with an enemy right in front of her to grab it, and tap it any other time to fire a hairball, exactly as on foot. The roll took the east button, so getting off Samus is now down plus the call button.
Measured on the same physics step, Mittens and Samus both reach full run speed in 0.56 seconds (she took 1.33 before) and both jump 2.97 units standing. With the double jump both reach about 5.2 to 5.3 units. Two old bugs turned up on the way: standing next to Samus could mount you by a rounding accident, and hopping off her could drop you straight back into the saddle. Both are fixed. The roll's invulnerable window in play, couch co-op, and a sound for her new roll and double jump are still to check.
Warp boxes in every world
The ruling was that boxes work like pipes: you can go in from any side, and there are real secret rooms and real shortcuts. Worlds 2 to 8 now carry 21 new box pairs, 42 boxes in all, on top of the 8 pairs in World 1 and the last stage. Eighteen of the new pairs lead to sealed secret rooms, with 83 new tokens inside them and one secret collectible in each. We looked for a shortcut in every world and kept only the ones that do not skip a stage's main idea. One shaves about 4 seconds by skipping a stretch with five enemies.
Boxes work from any side: floor boxes, ceiling boxes you press up into, and wall boxes you lean into. They now have their own faces instead of being the floor box turned over, and the wall boxes stand a little further out so the box shows beside the cat. A box also no longer swallows you again until you have let go of the stick once, so holding the stick through a trip cannot send you straight back where you came from.
Adding secrets exposed an old bug. The results screen graded every stage in Worlds 2 to 8 against the same fixed number of secrets (three), whatever the stage held, so a stage with one secret could never show a full set. The results screen and the all-secrets bonus now use each stage's own count, as the in-game counter already did.
One fix for two-cat play: the shared screen edge could pull a cat straight through a thin wall when the camera jumped, for example after a box trip. The edge now stops at the last spot where the cat's body fits. The warp boxes and the boss scenes added later in the day compile and have been checked by screenshot, but have not been played yet.
A boss hound, second pass
A fresh review of the hand-drawn hound boss found one believable hound with a continuous coat, but a head like a duck bill, a neck like a llama's, legs like pipes with rings round them, and belly-up frames that read as beige beans. This pass fixes those.
- Head and neck. The head is smaller (54 px, 0.36 of her body, down from 65) with a skull bump, a stop where the face dips, a shorter, deeper muzzle, a light jaw, an amber eye and long two-tone ears. The body is 14 px taller so she keeps the same 196 to 199 px standing height.
- Legs. The rings were the feathers' shadows falling across the legs. The feathers now hang behind the leg and cast none. Legs taper from 14 to 20 px at the top to 8 to 9 px at the pastern.
- Belly-up set. One readable pose, with four tapered limbs that fold and droop, and sleeping frames that breathe. Every frame differs from the next by at least 1000 px.
New checks cover leg taper, paw thickness, head silhouette, four visible limbs in every lying frame, and a frame-to-frame change floor. All 62 frames pass. The art is still weak in places, and none of it is installed or approved. Her dirt layers, which show each hit on her coat as the fight goes on, are in the game; a sprite catalogue bug that would have shown her clean base frames instead of those layers was found and fixed.