The Cathouse Tale was an erotic 3D furry project started in 2014 that gradually expanded in scope, brought on new staff, and fell into a lot of hard times. In the end, most of the staff couldn’t continue and we had to cancel the project. I am not permitted to share the source materials for the project, but I’ve collected all our preview materials and playable releases so that people that liked the project can at least enjoy what we put so much work into.

To play The Cathouse Tale and try the various demos we released, click here.
Or, download our previous preview content:

If you’d like to know more about what happened, I’ve moved a few of my last posts explaining the situation here. Thank you for your interest, and I hope you can find answers to your questions here.

Retrospective

I’ve seen a lot of opinions flying around about “what we did wrong” and what we “should have done all along,” and while I’m all for learning from our mistakes and working to improve ourselves, a lot of it seems misguided. I think it might help if I take a minute to try and explain how it looked and developed from the inside.

How It Started

This project basically started on the foundation of “between this handful of people, we have all the technical skills needed to make a game. Together, we can model characters, animate them, program the game, model an environment, design the game and write the story.” We had all of that, so we decided it would be a great idea to try for it.

A lot of groups could probably fall apart pretty quickly at this stage because the people working on it don’t actually get along, but I’m happy to say that, for the most part, we had a pretty decent dynamic going. Yes, there were problems, and yes, looking back, we could have put in more time and effort to become friends more than just coworkers, but each of us put in a lot in terms of cooperating, contributing to the team, and trusting each other. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about other indie teams with these horrible divisions and all this distrust and betrayal, and I’ve been so thankful we didn’t have any of that.

The Problems

The problems we had were… subtler. Mostly, they had to do with overconfidence and an excess of ambition. We had all these skills, and we were excited. We were in love with the idea of a huge game. If we didn’t quite know how to do something, we knew we’d figure it out along the way and make it work.

But there are always issues and challenges in building something this complex, and we hadn’t left slack for them. We had already set our goals really high, then the first or the second step proved harder than we expected. But we were determined, maybe stubborn, and we kept pushing on. We overcame the problems and found more problems with the next step. Eventually, the work we already had done started looking messy and needing to be revised or replaced as new problems came to light. The mountain was growing taller, the further we climbed.

Experienced teams know a lot about how this can happen, and how to account for it ahead of time. The truth is, we all had relatively little experience actually making a game. We had skillsets that were applicable, but for most of us it was our first time working on a game project, especially a team project of this scale, and it was gradually becoming apparent that an excess of determination wasn’t enough on its own to tackle all of this.

The Pressure

If anything, that made it harder. We’d promised ourselves and all of you that we’d accomplish all these things, and the harder it got, the more pressure we felt. We could not fail at this. We had to get this done faster and better. But the more we pushed ourselves, the more tense we got, the more sleep we lost, and the worse things got.

This all happened gradually. Enthusiasm turned to determination, then to stubbornness. Then to anger. We had the skills, but everything kept getting more complicated and difficult and it took forever to get anywhere. We started to hate ourselves, and we grew to fear what our supporters would say. We could get it done, we just needed… more time.

Each of us handled the pressure different ways. Some would turn their anger on others, pushing even more pressure on those that were “slowing things down.” We tried to support each other and prevent abuse, but people have to talk together to work. Some would take all the blame on their shoulders as if it could help to feel even worse. Black depression became a constant companion.

People would go silent for a while. They just couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes they’d come back and apologize. We’d just keep trying to carry on where we could. The project had been poisoned with some kind of creeping despair by now, and actual progress seemed a rare breath of fresh air.

It all came on us so slowly, growing heavy at times then easing off, but we were never able to fight it off fully. This project has become one of the most dreadful experiences of my life, if I’m being honest.

Why It Happened

If you want to know the true cause, it was this: we aimed far too high for the experience we had. Yes, we had the technical skills, but we were inexperienced in this field. We should have started with a small project, something we could complete from start to finish in less than a year, just to understand how a game unfolds in development and what it asks of each of us, beyond how good we are at programming or sculpting or what have you. It takes strong planning and direction, a full understanding of how the plan will break down in reality, and basically, it takes experience in the field.

That’s one of the big challenges with indie game design, especially in the adult field, I think. Anyone can throw together the technical skillset with some work and just start making something, but it’s a big gamble how well you’ll actually work together, and how good you are at estimating the work you can do vs. what your plans will take. Many people working in this field aren’t working for some big, AAA company for a reason. They don’t have experience, or they don’t work well in a team, or there’s some other problem that makes them less than perfectly productive. Hell, lots of people working for the big companies have these issues too. Yes, some people have proven they can be dependably productive, and many of those are the ones you hear about, the big smash hit indie teams on Patreon that just keep churning out quality content. That’s great. But it’s far from guaranteed.

Our team came close to working. I think if we’d made some better decisions early on, we might well be one of the Big Names right now. But we didn’t, and slowly but surely, the small problems became big problems, and it all broke down.

The Money

It’s not a matter of laziness, and nobody was stealing your money. I’ve only ever paid people for actually getting work done, and in proportion to their productivity. That meant that if a member of the team, for example, had extensive dental surgery, then their father died, and they were just completely out of commission for a month and didn’t get any work done, I couldn’t pay them. I felt awful about it, but I knew it was the right thing to do. And when someone was so damn depressed and couldn’t bear to look at the project and they only got a week’s worth of work done in a month, I only paid them a quarter what they’d usually get otherwise. Believe me, if they could have gotten the work done, they would have. Money has already been pretty tight for many members of the team for some time now.

If you honestly think that depression “isn’t real,” then you’re entitled to your opinion. But I’ve seen it kill this project as good people curdled up inside trying to deal with the pressure and frustration and fear of disappointing you all, and having everything they’ve gone through dismissed so casually doesn’t sit well with me.

What We Can Learn

I’ve tried to account for how things looked “from the inside” here. It’s hard to put a complicated series of events and interactions from over several years into words and make it simple to understand, but I feel like I at least covered the important points. I’m not trying to fish for more sympathy here, and I’m not trying to call down those that are angry with us with a big “how dare you.” I just want to try and help you guys understand. I know you’re frustrated, because I’m sure as hell frustrated. I know you want to understand what happened, because I’m still trying to understand myself, and find some way to avoid ever having to go through this again.

The best advice I can give to other developers trying to get started in this field is to start small, especially if you don’t have professional experience as a game designer. Make a small, simple project and complete it from start to finish. Scale up slowly, because every size of project can have its own challenges. Try not to let the excitement of a big idea lure you into over-committing.

And the best advice I can give to all of you as supporters is to encourage the people you might support to do this. If someone makes big promises, ask about their experience working on projects of that kind. If they don’t have any, then it’s better to say “as cool as that sounds, maybe start smaller for now?”

Patreon incentivizes big, exciting ideas with little actual proof that they’re practical. That’s something we all need to be careful about, I think. We let ourselves dream too big, and we got a lot of other people swept up in that dream when we didn’t know just how huge the cost in skill and man-hours would actually prove to be. We probably got more funding for those big ideas than we would have for something small and reasonable, so the system encouraged us in this. That’s the trap.

There’s not really a simple solution to avoid that in the future, but with caution, we can all come to do better. To make better plans, and support those that are better at planning for the resources they have. It’s been hard, but I’m still incredibly grateful to Patreon and to all of you for giving us this chance. I’m sorry it’s all panned out like this– I’ll never be able to express how crushing it’s been seeing all of this fall apart. But I’m still glad to have had the experience, to have learned from it, and to have worked with all of you to try and make this foolish dream come true.

Thank you all.
-Lithier

 

Where Are They Now?

Wolvalix was the oldest remaining member of the team, and one of the original founders. He had a lot of talent, not just for character modeling, but for 2D art as well, and a distinct style. He was also very skilled with rigging and animating, which made him an incredibly versatile and important member of the team.

Unfortunately, I know the least about what’s going on with him at this point. You can check out his FurAffinity over here. He had a Tumblr as well, back before the big ban on adult content. We did pick up a blip earlier this year on a third party site to at least tell us that he’s still alive, but it looks like he’s withdrawn from the community altogether to take care of his own needs. I hope he’s able to keep creating after all this.

Invertex was our immensely talented programmer. He agreed to come in and pick up the pieces after our original programmer went AWOL, but while we were looking for a stopgap, he did a lot to improve the project and open up new options for us. He was always very helpful with designing new tools to make our jobs easier and trying to make our more ambitious ideas possible.

We were out of touch for a while, but it sounds like he’s finally getting his life together and moving on, but not in this industry. He doesn’t have a lot of presence online these days, I think he’s worried about unsavory types harassing him out of some kind of misguided anger. All I know is, he worked himself half to death trying to make this crazy project work, and he doesn’t deserve any more than he’s already put himself through.

Gloveboxofdoom was the most reliable and professional worker I’ve seen in this field. He maintained an excellent standard of quality making the environment of The Cathouse, and I wish we could have done more with his work. Where the rest of us were falling apart, he kept chugging along no matter what, and I definitely admire his resolve.

He doesn’t seem to be working in this industry anymore, but I know that he already has a job in the broader games industry, so I’m sure he’s doing well for himself, and you can get more info on what he’s up to over on his Twitter. He’s also a 2D artist on top of that, and you can check out some of his work over on his FurAffinity.

Lithier is me, so I at least know more about what I’ve got going on. I wrote for the project, I helped with design and coordination, and I acted as a bridge between you guys and the team, but I feel like in the end, I hardly got a chance to really contribute. I was actually recruited by Wolvalix because he liked my work on my own adult game, My Very Own Lith. I’ve been updating it steadily this whole time, and it’s nearing completion now.

In short, MVOL is a text-based simulator of a cute little catboy(or girl) that you can befriend, seduce, dominate, or get dominated by. And then things get weird, and then feelings happen. It’s a slow start and about 20-30 hours to explore all the content through multiple playthroughs, so there’s a ton to dig your teeth into, but I’ve accumulated a pretty passionate fanbase that appreciate the emotional impact it’s made on them. And also they probably like all the sex, but are embarrassed to talk as much about that. I actually just finished adding some Final Endings, also! So you can play it from start to finish at long, long last.

I’m still working out what I’ll be doing after MVOL is finished, but I’ve got a pretty detailed series on my site’s blog talking about the lessons I’ve learned from the game and my thoughts for future projects, so if you’ve enjoyed my previous posts talking about the lessons I took from CHT, you may be interested in checking those out. They might contain mild spoilers for MVOL, though.

If you’d like to give my game a try, you can play it right here, though Flash being a mess these days, you might have a more reliable time if you just download it here for PC or Android. And yes, I know Flash is circling the drain, I’m working on a port for long-term playability.

Sorry to turn this into a bit of a promo. I did have a few people ask about my own project, and if anyone else on the team had an ongoing project in the field I’d have been happy to plug them as well, but as far as I know I’m the only one really sticking around. I hope you’ll give it a look, and help me remember to stay humble and keep my goals manageable!

…Well. Assuming nothing else comes up, and if you don’t like games that make you read, I… guess this is goodbye.

Thank you for playing our game, and for joining us on this journey, as strange and heartbreaking as it’s been. I hope you’ll remember us, whether you enjoyed what we made, or just take the lessons from our failures to do better or help others do better in the future.

From me, and The Cathouse Tale Team, and from all the characters in the mansion that wanted to do so much more to entice you, excite you, and get to know you… Goodbye, and live well.

-Lithier