Some Basic TCM Info (Patreon)

I know I've been throwing around the bare minimum on The Cat's Meow insofar as what's going on with its development and what it is as a project in the public eye for a little bit now, but let's bring people up to speed a little bit.

For starters, it's not a visual novel. It'll have visual novel elements like any game in how the characters interact visually in that style, but it's closer to somewhat of an actual game with mechanics rather than a book. 

Here's the preliminary menu flowchart, and here is... a fair bit to kind of take in but I'll break it down into core concepts.

The game itself largely takes place on the world map, where you choose a location to travel to, move there, and get random encounters on the way. These encounters will be something akin to if you were going into a random battle in an RPG, but rather than fighting you'll be using cards to shape how the encounter goes. Nothing overly complex, it's all about numbers.

Cards like this are something you collect over the course of the game to build a deck. This deck of cards is used in your encounters measuring the numbers of the cards you use against a set value presented by the encounter itself. Typical rule is that if you want to bottom, use lower numbers and if you want to top use the high ones. It's not about winning and losing, it's closer to directly controlling the content you want while still making progress through the story. 

But there are two numbers here, so how do you pick? Red numbers are used during your sexual encounters. Any time you're wanting to solve an encounter, or attempt to resolve it sexually those are the numbers you'll be looking at. The UI will prompt you to know which numbers to look at by having an indicator or just be a different color when that's the option you go with. The blue however is your merchanting option. Some people will respond well to a hard sell, others a sly grift, but the option is there should you choose to not want to bed any of the characters you meet.

Speaking of characters, while I loved working with the characters in Password I'm really using TCM to design just some fun (read: hot) characters and do interesting things with them. Especially given how chaste Password ended up out of necessity, I'm all for hearing what people find to their liking while still in the early stage of development. Who knows? Catch me on the right day and I might just be able to throw something like it in the pile.

Shortly after this post goes live, I'm going to be unlocking some of the channels on the server that handles the discussion of the project so you can have a better look at some of the stuff that's already planned, so please let me know there what you think!