Day 12 (Early): In the whee hours of 2 AM, I have discovered the solution to my glitch! Thank the lord, I didn't want to give up on this project.
I don't have anything to really show for it, but for those interested, in gamemaker, there are (I think) two functions for creating instances of an object.
I was using instance_create_layer, and for some reason, this was causing me to be unable to drop a cat if I have used the "room_goto" function.
I switched over to instance_create_depth, and it seems to work 100% correctly.
I have no idea why this is the case... but maybe one day I'll figure it out. Until then, I'm just happy I can continue my project.
Now, today is Valentines day, so you probably won't get another Devlog until Day 13, but I promise, it will have some progress! We're in the last couple of days... so it better!
Until then, peace out!