One loop for every boss, cleaner cat poses, and a fresh look at every stage

Every boss fight is one simple loop

All nine boss fights were rebuilt around one rule. Hit the dog with four hairballs and he flops down, dizzy and seeing stars, for about three seconds. Jump on his head. Do that three times and you win. Every hairball counts, from either cat.

The old special tricks (sugar traps, switches, fetch games) no longer decide a fight. Each dog keeps his own look, his own moves and his own simple attacks, so the bosses still feel different; what changed is that you always know how to beat one. The intro captions now teach the loop in one line.

The arenas got simpler to match. Anything that stopped you reaching a dizzy dog's head is gone, and each arena now checks itself: every spot where a boss can fall dizzy must be reachable with an ordinary jump.

Couch co-op fixes

The automated runs found two problems with Samus, the dog the cats can ride:

• Getting off Samus now means off. Jumping straight up right after you dismounted used to drop you back into her saddle, and at the mud room door in 1-3 that could happen again and again. Now you only mount her by landing on her after you have stepped clear of her. Calling her still works at any time.
• A partner stuck in the saddle. In two-cat runs, the second cat could end up stuck on Samus in 6-3 and keep the pair from reaching the boss room. Fixed.

The shop also has two new lines, "You have got to be kitten me!" and "Gimme your paws and I'll give you more extra lives." She no longer names a cat, because you might be playing any of them.

The cats look better in the small moments

• The "seeing stars" ring used to sit right on the cats' ears, so they looked like gold antlers. The stars now circle above the head.
• A one-pixel sliver of head used to hang in the air as a cat dived into a warp box. Gone.
• The yawn opens the mouth and pins the ears back, the cheer on Samus's back raises a paw, and the point reaches further forward.
• The walk cycle's legs now read as four legs with white socks instead of a white jumble.

Two small mistakes were also fixed: one frame of the Duchess getting up had a pointed ear standing straight up, which an Afghan hound's ear never does, so it was trimmed to a rounded crown that matches her other poses. And Samus had a stubby tail on two of her six panic frames while the other four keep it tucked. Now all six match.

Markings live in a table

The second player's cats (Simon, Bones and Gidget) get their coat patterns from lookup tables keyed to each animation frame. Change a frame without rebuilding its table and the cat loses its markings on that frame. The tables were rebuilt and every changed frame checked.

One table had quietly gone stale: the one that darkens Molly's and Simon's white bibs in the wet World 5. The tool that builds it refused to run whenever any frame had been touched up by hand, so it simply had not been run for a while. It now handles touched-up frames one at a time, and the table is current again.

A fresh look at every stage

All 24 stages were rendered again from the same 136 camera spots as the last background review and judged again.

A few of today's fixes:

• The Line (2-3): the backyard showed two fences, one above the other, each with its own washing line and socks. The lower one was a second copy of the backdrop, placed to fill the lawn. It now sits behind the real fence, so only one fence shows.
• The sewers of World 5: the shafts of light from the gratings looked like stacked glass panels. Each one now fades down in twice as many smaller steps. In 5-2, the goal's light threw a shadow from a small ledge all the way to the floor and left the goal bowl in the dark; the shadow now ends just under the ledge.
• Home Sweet Home (1-1): two identical fish paintings hung in the same view. One is gone.
• A pennant hanging over a banner had cut its text down to "E 4". The pennant is gone and the banner reads "EST 1974" again.

Some reported problems were not problems at all. The editor draws slow-scrolling wall pieces in a different place than the game does, so a "bare wall" and a tap touching an apron both looked fine once they were checked at their in-game positions.

Numbers

• 13 automated runs, solo and two-cat, through all 24 stages each time, with 0 errors in every run.
• Every boss was beaten through the new loop in every valid run, with no help from the test system. The latest build cleared all 24 stages with no deaths.
• The two-cat boss-hit test passes for Bruiser and Snookums: the second player alone stuns each of them in under a second of shots, and when both cats fire on the same frame every hit is counted.
• A death in the final stage, the stage timer running out (it costs one life, not the run), pause, a benched second cat rejoining and a respawn at a checkpoint all pass their checks.

All of this is verified by the automated runs. Nobody has played the new boss loop by hand yet, and that is the real test.