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Hello, everyone! Finally! After so many years of hard work we have our release date: Stray will be open to the public on July 19, 2022! And as you may have seen during today’s State of Play, we’re pleased to announce that Stray will also be available to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium members* at this time.
It really means everything to our small but oh-so-dedicated team, and we can’t wait to see people explore this world we’ve put so much heart and passion into.
The vision for this game – originally called “HK Project” – began seven years ago by Koola and Viv, the co-founders of BlueTwelve Studio. It is truly amazing to see that it is now a full game and will soon be experienced and hopefully enjoyed by so many players around the world. We have evolved along this path and learned so much. Of all the unexpected challenges and discoveries we found, creating an interactive cat was definitely the hardest!
Attempting to control a cat – whether in real life or creating a video game – is definitely no walk in the park! We knew from the start that our star character’s controls and animations had to be absolutely spot on to properly convey that exciting sense of skill and movement. So Miko, our cat animator, took the challenge to heart and spent a lot of time looking for pictures and video references. The good and somewhat surprising thing we found is this: it really seems like the entire internet was basically invented for the sole purpose of hosting tons of cute cat pics and videos! So we ended up with a lot of very good material to work with as references.
Also, about 80% of the people on the team are cat owners (or owned by a cat, depending on how you look at it) and we even have two cats in the studio that work with us almost every day! Their names are Oscar and Jun, and while they’re not the most prolific collaborators to be honest, they certainly bring a lot of happy vibrancy to the studio.
Seeing them interacting with objects around the office (and sometimes even shutting down our computers at the worst possible moment!) gave us quite a bit of inspiration for the different cat interactions possible throughout the game. And of course, they’ve all been reviewed and approved by Jun and Oscar themselves!
But all of this effort to bring the cat to life has been made so that people can really enjoy exploring as a cat in the game. We’re very excited to finally be able to show a look at some new environments like “Antvillage” in our release trailer, which is this village built around a huge reservoir. It’s a good example of how the cat’s extraordinary abilities allow us more freedom in our level design, especially vertically to explore ups and downs in the world.
When we decided to add the backpack and the little drone called the B-12 that follows the cat everywhere, it opened up a new level of possibilities for us to interact with and learn about the environment. Especially the ability to talk to the characters of the world was really important to convey some basic points about the environment or to get some more backstory from some of its inhabitants.
Our journey as a small team creating our very first game is finally reaching its ultimate goal, and we all can’t wait to find out how players will react to exploring this unique world and engaging with its colorful inhabitants on July 19th. So on behalf of the entire team including Jun and Oscar: Have fun everyone!
*Availability of Classics, Game Trials and Game Catalog varies by time and plan. See https://www.playstation.com/Plus for details and updates on PS Plus offers. PlayStation Plus is an ongoing subscription that automatically incurs a recurring subscription fee (at the then-current PS Store price) at the frequency you select at purchase until canceled. Terms of use apply: play.st/psplus-usageterms