Subject: Cat-Life
Variants: Cat-Life GS, Cat-Life for Source, Cat-Life O
Setting: Black Mesa, New Mexico
Welcome to the world of Cat-Life.
Cat-Life is a complicated mod concept with a complicated history. This is one of the most original concepts you will ever find. In Cat-Life, you enter the mind and body of an ordinary house cat. After some experimentation, we are treated to the Black Mesa Resonance Cascade from the Newton the cat’s point of view.
The Cat-Life project itself can be broken down into three variants. Cat-Life O is the designation for the original concept and its many partial versions prior to 2007. That was the old Friendly Garg’s Stories / Garg-o-holics version of the mod. You can read a bit about the history of Cat-Life and why it has been in development for so long on the Cat-Life O page.
Cat-Life GS is the 2007 mod which began with BiGToM’s leadership, some basic maps, and little more. The project, formerly known as simply “Cat-Life” or “Cat-Life for Half-Life” has undergone a number of changes in the last few years. With actual leadership and an effort to finish, the mod has released a temporary demo.
Now, with the change to Cat-Life GS, the mod is undergoing an overhaul. Although the mod will not be developed as fully as CLS, Cat-Life GS will be a full mod and will be released first. Read more about CL GS here.
Lastly, Cat-Life for Source or CLS is the modern version of Cat-Life. This mod is now under leadership of the administrator and is being written by the author of Conundrum and the HL2 Cataclysm (RP Thread).
CLS will be bigger, darker, and more of a game then a mod. Even so, it will be a free mod for public consumption. And it is our hope that Cat-Life for Source will, when ready, become a sort of crown jewel in the supply of BWL Projects. We honestly hope to give our fans a game experience to remember and you should expect this project to live up to the motto of BWL Development… Epically Awesome in Every Way.
To read more about Cat-Life for Source, visit the CLS page.
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Blurb: 17-07-2010
Wildcat here. Hey guys. I decided that it was time to simplify both the Cat-Life page and the overall mod as we understand it. My solution is to divide everything up into three parts. CL O is the original mod idea and all the changes and hiatuses. CL GS is the current demo release and my planned overhaul which is explained on the CL GS page. And CLS, which will begin work more visibly as soon as CL GS is about ready for release.
I’m taking charge of most of this now since the bulk of Team GS has disbanded and the mod is in dire need of the overhaul before release. Expect a good game with a blend of the story by Dark Shadow and elements from CLS.
I can’t explain everything to clearly here… so if you have questions or whatever, be sure to post in the Cat-Life forum. Comments below are also welcome… that’s why I added the comment form to so many pages.
– The Wildcat
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srry about previous comment i may have made but seriously this thing started a year or 2 ago and its almost halloween 2011 can you give an estimate of when it,ll be out
The long story short is I want it out sometime next year. 2012 or bust, meaning either we get the GS version done in 2012 or we release what we have and move on to the source version.
finish the game already its 2011 and it started 2003 this is getting stupider by ythe minute i am calling this mod deader then dead till it is realesed
Okay, if that’s the best you can do, your comments are going into moderation from now on.
I’ve said before that I won’t tolerate this type of negativity. And I meant every word.
i mean not to be mean but seriously i have been waiting long time i am getting bored and annoyed not to mention is multiplied when i don,t take my bipolar medicine srry but seriously i would like to play whole game before 2012 end of the world and srry again for negativity
will you finish i have been wait for it since it started i just want it to be done
Hopefully so. The biggest issue with the Cat-Life GS project was that, despite having lots of maps, it wasn’t really tied together properly. All the maps needed major de-bugging and they all would have needed significant work to connect them.
And even then, they didn’t really follow a proper narrative despite the story that DS had written for the team. I could probably take years to modify and unite everything, but I would rather just make new maps. Thus the overhaul project was born.
The big problem now is just time. Cat-Life is one of over thirty projects I am overseeing in my spare time. I’m bumping it up in the line-up, but I still need to release new content for the site from time to time. Not to mention my job issues.
I plan to recruit some 3d artists to give us some more models and voice actors for the script I am still preparing. But the maps come first and I want to work on some of these personally now.
I had hoped to at least start some map testing in November, but we aren’t far enough for that yet.
Expect some kind of news once I get a bit more refinement into the first few maps. And I’m planning to make a BWL Behind The Scenes episode dedicated to Cat-Life fairly soon… sort of kill two birds with one stone by making new content for the site and working on the GS mod.
okay this is getting annoying waiting for it i really want it done and why isn,t the won version done
Which is why we plan to release the original. Some people have been watching this mod since 2003 and I don’t want to just drop them. The GoldSource game will be released with the content BiGToM has and is debugging. And the Code changes by bluefire will also be added in. It just won’t be the same story or have as many sourcey bells and whistles as Cat-Life: Source.
but goldsource is more friendly for me
Yeah, more or less. We haven’t started much work on the Source version yet, but I felt that GoldSource was a little too limited to make the game I had in mind. Further, the story was not much more then the typical old FPS mod.
Frankly, I wanted more. So, I am working on the plot of the Source version and it will serve as a “reboot” to the franchise.
Cat-Life 2 will be a sequel to Cat-Life: Source. The original Cat-Life will be a completed mod, but development on it will end with the release.
I wrote an article about some of this back in January. http://www.bwldevelopment.com/archives/1222
Source version of Cat-Life? Is there 2 versions ?
Sounds good man I’ll love wallclimbing, what new features are implemented?
So far, we aren’t planning too many new features beyond the demo release, but we are trying to fix those up a bit. Additionally, bluefire plans to add a wall cling feature using the duck key so you can hang from walls for a short time. And we hope to have that work with some of the monsters too.
We also hope to have some more tweaks to the monster codes so that, for example, the grunts aren’t trying to kill you with grenades anymore. Likewise, we don’t want barneys or scis to interact with you so often anymore. I can imagine the strange nature of Barney offering to buy a cat a beer.
We also are going to implement a very specific meme related death sound. Hopefully, in all of the coding, we can also fix the hull issues so that the player is properly scaled and not just sitting in the floor.
Other new additions will be related to the early clones I made for zombie cats, juvenile headcrabs, and military dogs as well as friendly cats. But all of that was intended for a sub-section of the game that likely will not be in the GoldSource version of the game.
I do want that in the Source version though.
Overall, there are different abilities already present in the demo such as sprinting and long jumping and such. But we want to refine those. And I know I haven’t mentioned everything here… that’s just because I can’t go into too many details at this time.
So, what’s going on with this mod?
theplebes@hotmail.com
My plan is to talk about the mod just a little in our first BWL Video Update. But the main point will be that BiGToM hasn’t finished debugging the maps yet and bluefire is still working on the source code.
Most recently, bluefire was working on the limitations for wall jumping and wall climbing.
Beyond that, I have started writing and designing for the Source Reboot and BiGToM has taken an active interest in making some test maps for some of my early plans.
Additional, we already have at least 8 songs for the CLS soundtrack from King Cobra (Key City Productions).
Hi! The idea of a cat as protagonist in the Black Mesa Research Facility is genial. But it could be more realistic:
…
the cat’s point of view is almost at the same height than a human’s (I think that for example the doors should seem higher);
the cat should can jump and fall without becoming hurted, on condition that it watches the ground (except when falling from too high points, from which watching the ground is unuseful);
cats see in the dark (they don’t use a torch!), so I think at an effect similar to that seen in the games of the series Penumbra, an automatic natural catlike night vision;
I don’t know
Hm… I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to play the demo yet, but we have a dim light that occurs for cat night-vision [we disabled the flashlight] and hopefully bluefire will be able to improve that further. Also, the POV is actually now only 20 units tall as compared to the standard 72.
The falling idea sounds pretty good as long as it is limited to a certain height. Once a cat falls far enough, even a cat would be hurt or killed. But extending the safe falling distance by looking down does sound interesting. We’ll just have to wait and see what bluefire comes up with.