Why is Matt’s Hidden Cats Taking so Long?

I’m realising it’s been around 3 years since I started working on Matt’s Hidden Cats – which is how long the original version of Epic Battle Fantasy 5 took to make, and that’s my best game by far!

So you may be wondering why a seemingly simpler project is taking so long…?

Well, I also need to answer this for myself to regain some sanity.

So here’s some reasons…

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First of all, it’s not the only thing I’ve been working on. In this time I also ported Epic Battle Fantasy 4 to Android and updated the Windows version (sorry, iOS fans). I’ve been supporting the EBF5 modding community and fan-made Chinese translations for my older games. And I’ve been doing general maintenance, promotions, and customer support for my existing games, which are still selling well.

Secondly, I’m not working full time anymore! I have more hobbies now. I’m travelling more. I’m playing more video games. I’m spending more time with friends and family. All of that makes me feel like I’m not being as productive as I used to be, but I certainly am – it’s just that I’m producing personal experiences rather than content for the web. Though there is also a lot of procrastination in there that I could cut out.

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In addition to spending less time working on game development, the scope of Matt’s Hidden Cats has also massively increased over time, for a few reasons…

There’s a LOT of hidden object games out there, and while many of them are very short and simple (or otherwise not very good), some of them are fantastic. Hidden Folks, Hidden Through Time, and the upcoming Lost and Found Co are amazing games, and I want to make sure that Matt’s Hidden Cats is at least as good as any of them.

And after seeing the success of EBF5 – a game that is still selling 7 years after its release – I want to continue making games that have long-lasting appeal. I don’t want to make games that go out of fashion or feel outdated eventually. I want Matt’s Hidden Cats to be a game that will still be good, relative to the competition, 10 years from now.

And what that means is that it has to have a TON of content, secrets, lore, and re-playability, as well as being polished and easy to get into for new players.

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Another big challenge is that it’s by far the biggest project I’ve worked on from scratch. All my other big projects were sequels to smaller games that already nailed down a lot of the mechanics, and a lot of the code and assets could be reused. In Matt’s Hidden Cats, I’m solving an unusually large number of design problems for the first time, and in some cases I’m re-making mechanics and user interface elements that I wasn’t very happy with. Sometimes I’ll code something that just doesn’t feel good, and never sees the light of day – where as with my older games, it was very rare for me to spend time on cut content.

This also makes technical challenges more difficult, as features that I assumed would be trivial can end up being very complicated, simply because I didn’t have the experience to know that in advance. A big pain for me has been learning about how graphics are transformed – working with transform matrices, how to check if an object is mirrored or not, converting one coordinate space into another, programming motion tweens, etc