My Pet Plays This Game – Stray

Stray is a third person adventure game, in which you play the story of a street cat that has to find the way home. It is set amidst the “detailed neon-lit alleys of a decaying cyber city and the murky environments of its seedy underbelly”.

While the newly released title Stray gets an outstanding first week of sales and breaking all records and overwhelmingly positive critics, it seems that owners are not the only ones taking a liking to this game, our furry companions are absolutely loving it. Many gamers have been filming themselves playing and showing how their pets have become transfixed by the strange animal on the screen and meowing in return.

With the worldwide problems happening at the moment, this might be the type of content that we didn’t knew we needed, but that is more than welcomed. Many similar videos can be found on social networks, each more wholesome than the previous one. A twitter account has been made to regroup many of the cat reactions to the game.

Animals are usually rarely interested in what’s shown on the screen. The graphics being very realistic and the art direction with exceptionally good lighting must certainly help; but its the realism in the animation, the behaviour of the cat and its meows that ultimately trick our pets into reacting. Because of the structure of their eyes, cats are more likely to engage in an image that contains a combination of red, green and blue paired with swiftly moving objects. Small, quickly moving objects are avoided at all costs by TVs and films due to the low fps, but video-games do not suffer of it and have a lot of such movements.

The feline animations were done exclusively by hand using key-frames, no motion capture in here. This is because they wanted more freedom in the animations, many of which would be very difficult or even dangerous for a real cat to do, even more so loaded with a tracking suit.

From the moment the first footage of the game appeared online, users were instantly obsessed by the premise – a huge reaction that the indie team at BlueTwelve quite weren’t anticipating. Doing interviews one after the other last month, Producer Swann Martin-Raget said it was very important to allow users to feel as annoying as possible while playing. A huge portion of the team at BlueTwelve “are cat owners – or owned by cats depending on how you see it”.

“We also have cats in our office that work with us every day. Sometimes they turn off the computer when you’re about to save your work, or start ‘singing’ during an important call. So it’s a very nice reminder that even though they’re absolutely cute and adorable, they also have their own personalities. Having that in the game was really important from the start.”

In order to better convey the effortless, agile, virtuose, noiseless movements of felines deep into the gameplay itself, BlueTwelve chose to automate the platform jumps. In the classic fashion of platformers videogames, there are jumps that miss, and that breaks the fluidity and the speed of cat movements. They made it impossible to fall in order to shift the challenge from jumping platforms to exploration and observation, seeing the paths in order to move forward.

Stray by BlueTwelve Studios and Annapurna Interactive, available on PC and Playstation