Wow this is so insanely up my alley haha
Presentation is very fun, reminds me of old console point-and-clicks like the Goonies one, and the heart-rate monitor and uterus x-rays were surprisingly hot and well-rendered. I also appreciated that the character's identity was ambiguous and undisclosed, made it feel very immersive as a trans guy with certain interests.
I always liked the other Rubber Wizard games when I played them after previous Strawberries had ended! The wizard themself has such an oddly cute design.
The puzzle elements felt both more in-depth and a little more obtuse than before, making for an experience that became a little tedious at times but still compelled me to try and finish it as best I could.
Overall, it was enjoyable and I could definitely feel the ways in which it refined a little from the past entries while keeping the same casual, kinky vibe of the cast & location :)
Heh yeah, mine also fizzled out on the original idea and I'm trying to throw together a simple twine thing so as not to be totally empty handed since ultimately i just really want the experience of finishing something. I have a really bad habit of letting works in progress pile up, leaving me with little to show. I hope your own gamedev goes well through the rest of 2025 even if it isn't in time for the jam :) !
It seems really fun, but I have no mouse and it's borderline unplayable on a trackpad :') I cannot right click and left click at the same time, and it often misreads an attempt to change from one to the other as me petting the little guy (which is cute but not quite what I'm going for). The controls seem really smooth otherwise, and the game is visually extremely cute and nice-looking! Between this and Body Heat, you seem very skilled at getting a sense of "creature movement" & momentum that suits the critters you show.
Yes, I understood what you meant. However, it isn't really my fault if game elements I enjoy are frequently paired with two ultra-popular tag categories, even when they barely apply. You mention this problem in your own third paragraph. I'm interested in games featuring anthropomorphic characters, for example, but looking up "Furry" + "Platformer" while excluding "Erotic" still nets me a lot of porn games because "erotic" doesn't cover related subtags like "NSFW", "Adult", or "18+". For every cute game like Fech the Ferret or Inukari, I see over ten other games that are fetish content or outright nsfw. If I could just exclude all adult content tags, I'd be a lot happier with my results.
I haven't really noticed a malware problem because I don't download most of the games I see, because most of the games I see up-front don't interest me. I have noticed a lot of rather cookie-cutter looking games, but I just figured it was the latest horror game / anime game / whatever other style trend. Game dev is easy to get into now, which is both a great thing and a terrible thing lol.
Yes, I understand that on principal. However, I've found that whenever i select a tag I am interested in (not story-rich, as that was something I assumed would bring up word-heavy games in the first place) that isn't explicitly an action genre tag like "platformer" or "bullet-hell", I tend to see a lot of visual novels anyway. And when I do filter out specifically "visual-novel", I instead see many horror games that I am not interested in. But, if I filter "horror", then the same thing happens in reverse.
A negative filtering system would alleviate the problems people have had with itch.io over the years wrt to finding the games they want to play and are interested in seeing. I never said they're not games, only that I would like to be able to filter them out as well as filtering out horror games at the same time. As it stands, I can only filter one at a time and my content feed tends to filled with the other because of their high popularity in recent months. I was merely offering a more out of the box suggestion because requests for a filter system seem to receive little apparent consideration from administration. If you are tired of seeing these suggestions, then maybe it would be best for administration to address that it will/will not ever be a feature.
If a proper filtering and exclusion system is not going to be implemented, then maybe a compromise can be made. There is a deluge of visual novels on the platform, more than enough to warrant its own category similar to how "Games", "Game Assets", and "Comics" can all be separately searched and viewed. This might help reduce the chokehold they have over the itch.io library and reduce the site algorithm's ability to show you nothing but visual novels because you made the mistake of clicking on five of them without realizing what they were.
Of course, my main preference would be for an actual tag-filtering system that isn't the minuscule single exclusion that users have to manually add to the url. But given how many suggestions have been made across multiple years with little to no feedback whatsoever, it seems that site ownership has no interest in that.
It's stunning that there's no proper filter feature of any kind on a website that's existed this long. Given the longterm refusal to even address the issue by anybody with any actual power or influence over the site (No offense, mods), it seems pretty clear they don't care. May as well just officially endorse folks' web extensions at this point; I'm beyond tired of seeing the umpteenth Five Nights at Wuzzy's Fuzzy Ass Playhouse: For Real (SCARY!!) mishmash clone when I look up "puzzle" or "gay". Even using the singular filter tag that can even be applied in the url, removing -horror still leaves me with a pile of click-through games and visual novels designed for people who enjoy staring at big booba anime women. Deviant Art has a better filtering system than this.
From what I understand, the previous person primarily in charge of the web version stepped down for personal reasons, and the web version is in general a bit buggy and behind. You might be able to get it working again by clearing your cache/cookies for your browser, but that will delete your existing saves as a consequence.
I believe it is possible, but it depends on the event that caused them to become lost (And it might also vary between game modes? I always play on Expanded). Some events seem to send them directly to StarClan, others should add them to an "outside the clans" tab in the Cat List. There are rare events you can encounter while patrolling that will bring lost cats back into your clan sometimes :) I think they're very unusual to see, but I know some folks have had this happen.
I think the developers have said before they have no plans to create toggles that would remove or prevent trans cats from generating or occurring via events, as it is a harmless gameplay element that you can easily change per-cat in their profile options and the devs are also lgbt or allies to the community.
You'll need to "unzip" the file you've downloaded! If your computer doesn't have a program that can do that already, you can try downloading WinRAR or 7ZIP, as a couple of examples that work for Windows. One you have one of those, just open the clangen file with that- it should ask you if you want to "extract" the files; say yes and have them placed anywhere you like. I recommend giving it its own folder to avoid misplacing anything! Once you have that done, just find something called "Clangen.exe" and run that :)
Not sure if it's a bug or an oversight, but I noticed an interaction where a cat romantically promised to wait for the other to be a warrior- when that cat, already was one ahah. I believe this was a moon after they graduated, so i don't think it was an overlap error between the interaction and the name update? Very minor quirk, but it was a funny little inconsistency.
If they're continuing to survive, you may need to make another cat a medicine cat in order to have enough "healing power" available for him to recover? I saw a couple other folk mentioning something similar happening where serious illnesses/injuries wouldn't resolve despite not killing the character until they had more healers.
It's very cute and fun so far! I especially like the way the character movement feels distinctly different in each form; the subtle weightiness in the controls between normal Lexy and Starcow Lexy is really fun in particular.
That said, I read your dev blog about it and your concerns about the game's "horniness rating" and I guess I'd say based on the demo it's probably a "T" or "16+" kind of game; nothing is overtly sexual or nsfw, but there's themes that make it suggestive for a general audience.
I would say Cerise's dialogue and appearance (Moreso the clothes the Bandit is in + the handcuffs, rather than the Loony Tunes "nudity") is the most explicitly traditionally suggestive element- it seems clear this is some kind of flirtatious act between her and Lexy even if it isn't quite sexual.
After that, I'd say most of the transformations feel pretty tame; from least to greatest in terms of suggestiveness I'd probably put it as the stone form registering as a 0 on the "Hey, is this...?" scale and the inflation one as the highest, but that might just be bias because I'm aware it's a kink for some- DragonCave has a balloon dragon that's really no worse. I'd say the cow one seems kind of upper-middle, too, though I'm having trouble articulating why. The udders aren't the problem, of course; maybe it's simply that there's a distinct transformation animation from consuming something (milk) that makes the theme even more overt than in the slime form animation.
That's my 2 cents on the way the game comes across, as someone with a (admittedly much lighter) foot in the same kind of doorways. I don't think I'd recommend it to younger teens or children, but I wouldn't think much of it if I saw a highschooler or adult playing this, and I don't think there's anything in it that's really a "Shield your eyes!" moment. But, I do understand that the minor suggestive elements in the game may limit its appeal, so a more adventuresome and less flirty alternative dialogue may be welcome for others.
if you can use a program called Notepad++ (Not to be confused with just regular notepad), you can open up a file that contains all of your cats for that clan and their information such as names as well as various other data I haven't yet figured out the purpose of (most of them are numbers I can't decipher so far). Assuming it isn't corrupted, I haven't tried this out, but in theory you should be able to start a new clan, save it, open the new clan's cat file in N++, and copy+paste cats over from the old cat file. Save the changes you have made, and open that clan in the game; if it works, I imagine there will now be your favorite imported cats from the previous save file.
I would make a backup of the newer clan just in case, though, as this could potentially corrupt or kill that save. I can't guarantee this will work, but I'm just thinking based on what little I do know.
