ScottVee Gaming

"100 Romantic Cats" was a fun little hidden items game we tried on Steam about 2 months back.  It's part of a whole series of "100 Cozy Games".  This series is out of control, just the games with cats have 100 Candy Cats, 100 Chernobyl Cats (not cute at all), 100 Blacksmith Cats, 100 Bakery Cats, 100 Italy Cats ... on and on with about 250 of these listed on Steam right now. Each level is a separate game ... or is each game a level? The pure black on glaring-white layout hurt my eyes after about 15 minutes, but we were mostly done by then.  The overall art and UI is cute.  There was fun music and plenty of different meows to discover.  I'm tempted to try one of the games with less high-contrast art, for my ongoing eye strain issues. On the funny side, it turns out that every cat you find actually has a name, and you cat see them all as little achievements on Steam. These games are currently $1.99 each with a variety of bundles, from 3 games for $8.37 or 9 of...

We get an hour or two each weekend to hop on the gaming PC at my house, and we mostly play Matt's Cats these days.   Here is Part One . Somehow, clicking all the things and seeing all the gags never gets tired.  There are quirky dialogs in between levels, unusual sound f/x, hidden cards with fan art, profiles of their fictional creatures, and bits from sketchbooks.  The devs really poured their hearts into this project. But we're getting close to the end at this point.  We didn't notice that the 12 worlds vaguely follow the months of the year until world 10 was full of Halloween and world 11 got extra snowy. Here are some of the sights and sounds.   There's a huge map that's an internet cafe from Hell (note, the chairs roll around), a ghastly green level where they ask you if it gave you a headache (yes!), seascapes, maze levels lit only by a spotlight effect, you never know what's coming next.  Seas of blood?  Volcanos?  Sure. The only ...

In a  previous post,  I talked about how much we enjoyed the mini-zine-game Cat Distribution System by Jessika Rocha.  It ended by saying we were going to start drafting up some rules for the "Adoption Center" expansion that was in my head. Since then, it has gone through a few revisions and is in its final draft.  I contacted Jessika, creator of the original CDS game, and she said she liked it and it would be okay for us to upload it to Itch as an official expansion. Here is a shot of our last round of playtesting on Sunday...   I ended up designing a 3-page PDF of optional Player Sheets.  You can print these out to help you track and organize your cat rescues and adoptions.  The photo shows page one of our rules, plus the original CDS (black-and-white print) and the Player Sheets in action.  I found that I like to write development notes for our game projects as they are being worked on.  I think it adds a little value telling the extr...

This is an odd one we found at a community sale a few weeks ago.  Quads looked interesting, but it started annoying us right away.  After seeing what was in the box, we could never get it to fit back in the box again.  Tonight, we tried to play it, but the rules on the back of the box were so tiny, I couldn't read them even with my reading glasses on.  Yeah, they packed about 10 languages on there and made them all unreadable.  Then, when I did get a photo using the phone and zoomed in until it WAS readable, it was full of typos and translation fails, and still managed to sound incomplete. We tried to play the game using those fragments of rules, and yeah ... if they had used four actual colors, it would have been a no-brainer.  We could have started making moves with some confidence and sense of exploration.  But instead, they went with Black, Gray, White Ribbed Vertically and White Ribbed Horizontally, and Anne never did catch on to the ribbed patter...

We found this one at a community rummage sale.  Yeah, we're tired of Monopoly games, but Chihuahua-Opoly was too cute to leave behind.  Oddly, it was not produced by the usual Opoly companies but by a company called Late For the Sky, out of Ohio. The game itself is cute.  The choice of game pieces was odd, since none of them were dogs.  The whole idea that you are renting dogs and can mortgage dogs when you need money ... well that's screwy.  Most Opoly games run into the same issues when the theme changes drastically but there are no matching actions that make sense.  Here, the railroads were four temperments.  Weird.  The Chance and Community Chest cards were now Good Dog and Bad Dog cards but some of the choices were questionable, like getting fleas being in the Good Dog pile. Once you realize it's going to be this kind of surreal experience, it's fun.  More fun than regular Monopoly since you can't take this one too seriously.  Free ...

We released our first print-and-play little RPG/simulator game on itch.io.  With "Therapy Dog Goes to the Con" you can roll up encounters with people at a sci-fi convention, where they can interact with your friendly little service dog -- we're sure the pup will make everyone feel better.  You can find the game here . Background story:   We have been working on this one for a few weeks now.  After years of taking a small service dog (Dory) with us everywhere and seeing how often she brightens the day for people, we realized there were patterns.  And as someone who enjoys making up random tables for RPGs that may or may exist, this was a good challenge for me. We tried dozens of print-and-play mini RPGs on Itch, and it felt like this game would fits a niche on the site.  Sure, there are journaling games and games full of d6 tables, and games about dogs, but this one has all of those things along with some real-world good feel.  Then, while on a trip to ...