Looking Back at the Origin of Cat/Suit, Thinking Forward. (Patreon)

This is a bit of an odd post, I want to share the origins of Edgt and Cat/Suit. As I got the update out on the 20th. Its probably the first and only traditional art I'll be sharing, but bear with me because I'm sorta sentimental about this. For clarification, this is the first ever piece of art for Cat/Suit, the initial world Map. Drawn in my sketchbook by a campfire almost 6 months ago.

My wife and I go camping every August with her family... this last year, right before we went camping I had a total mental breakdown. And when I say right before, I mean the very morning before we left, I was a mentally broken mess on the floor of our tiny apartment crying in fits. Why? Well... its not easy being a freelancer, especially with near crippling social anxiety. I had been freelancing for the last 5 years, and it started to really take its toll. After 3 years I was getting tired, after 4 I had started to look forward to anything but commissions, and by this last year I felt like I was mining the last bits of my creativity just to generate interest. I love doing commission work, making art that people like and pay for, but it wasn't art that said anything about me, and it stopped making me happy. 

Nothing I made spoke a word as to who I was as a person. Very few people actually know what it is I like, most people just think what I paint for commissions is what I like and am interested in. Honestly though, very far from the truth most times. I had lost my identity as an artist, and the only thing I had to define myself was my art. I had very few friends because I purposely avoided making them, I rarely interacted with family even. I was working constantly, never making enough and living on the edge of every month being just one commission short of making bills, and even then I was and still am cripplingly in debt. 

Life was, and I know this can sound like hyperbole for some people but... life was getting too hard for me to manage. I feared for my wife, I feared for me, I hated what I was becoming and I broke. Desperately depressingly broken, I felt like no one cared about me, about what I wanted, about where I wanted to go. Like all I was to people was a pile of fetishes that weren't even mine. I was curled up in a fetal ball on the floor bawling my eyes out.

So we went to camp like we did every year, only this year with me a broken man who put on a face. 'I can do this, I can work on commissions and sell my soul to paint other people's fetishes forever', that's what I told myself. If I have two actual talents its dreaming big and being stubborn, and my stubbornness would carry me through.

My wife told me to just draw for myself, and after a week and a half I finally acquiesced and did. One evening while camping, I was sitting at the campfire and watching my nieces and nephews playing... and I started dreaming properly up an idea. It wasn't a new idea, more like one I'd been kicking around in my head for years now, but one I'd mined for the benefit of others, taking it and making commissions out of it. I sat at the fire and I thought... if I can't do commissions much more, if I have to quit because its too mentally grating on me then what? 

I started with just the shape of it, the idea of a world where want defined its every aspect. It was a world itself that wanted, want for the sake of want. It took from other worlds, built itself on that idea and everything around it started from there. Want itself isn't a poison, its not something bad to be decried. Something I think often on is the idea of wants versus needs. Growing up in poverty can do that, and so that's where the world started. 

I think of latex and rubber fetishes as almost pure expressions of want, distilled down to the viscosity and gloss of want itself. It separates the human element from the human itself, just the shape that people desire in humans. At least to me that's how I see it. That's where Edglings began, with that base fantasy element of 'The Black Goo' you see so prevalent in so many stories. But without some narrative pretext to it, no 'this goo just so happens to be magical thing x'. Edglings and the material they're made of is just the pure 'want' of all worlds trickling in, cast aside by those who abandon their desires and dreams and hopes. Inklings are just those same things but warped and twisted. Too much of anything being a bad thing and all.

The more I created Edgt (then still nameless) the more I found myself enjoying it conceptually. I was finding all these disparate ideas I'd had over the years coalesce and form into something greater... and though it wasn't until September that I really took the shot at starting this...well. The world of Cat/Suit and everything in it began with me at the lowest point I've ever been, staring at a campfire and funneling all those feelings of sadness, darkness, hollow hate-filled moments back into my art. Eventually, finding in that art what I would really enjoy and want again. That is the journey the game goes on, the journey making it is taking me on, and the journey you take with me by supporting my endeavor.

So... thinking forward. I want Cat/Suit to be larger than I am, I want to make a flagship property that can scream to the world 'Kink isn't something to be ashamed of' and succeed. I don't know if I can do that with just my ideas alone, no matter how ambitious I am. So this is what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be opening a 'Suggestions' channel on the discord, and making a new tier while shuffling some perks around. These will be solely world building suggestions. Monsters, places, characters, some lore ideas. There will never be any guarantee I'll use them, but the new tier will include a monthly bonus to contribute background lore and have it guaranteed get into the game and world. The main story, the overarching story I have all thought up, but I want to make a big BIG world. This is going to be your opportunity then to take a bigger role in shaping that.

I have more planned, a lot more. Merchandise, other games, spreading out into social media and even rebuilding parts of the game from the ground up. This year I'll be doing so much it'll be a dizzy blur. After the next update, there will even be a trailer for the game made up.

So thank you... a heartfelt, beginning of the year thank you. It's difficult for me to interact with people, triple so when it comes to trusting them. Life can do that, but Cat/Suit is bigger than me, so to do it justice that's just what I'll do. 

I'll finally be home on the 4th, and the Weekly Livestreams with recommence then along with me finally fixing the issues with last month's LEWD EDITION. Updates going forward shouldn't have nearly as many issues. Cheers.

                -A crow in love with shiny things