Cat Game Research
Frontier
Dev-log transmissions from the expedition
Portal API
Field Transmissions

Dispatches from the edge

Raw development notes from the CatGame expedition — engine architecture decisions, breakthrough moments, and lessons from the frontier of building a custom Vulkan engine from scratch.

Transmissions
3 transmissions
2025-03-01Gameplay
First Light: The Side-Scroll Prototype
The moment the engine became a game — building the first playable side-scroll prototype with physics-based movement, HFSM animation, and a cat that could jump.
2025-02-01Architecture
ECS Architecture: Lessons from Component Design
How we designed the Entity-Component-System architecture for CatGame, the mistakes we made, and why pure data components won over hybrid approaches.
2025-01-15Engine
Why Vulkan: Choosing the Hard Path
The decision to build a custom Vulkan renderer from scratch instead of using OpenGL, WebGPU, or an existing engine — and what that choice cost us.