Niv’s punny, touching Purrgatory hides friends in a maze
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Playing the adventure visual novel Purrgatory, I was struck by the sheer number of objects that developer Niv had made clickable — and also the heavy weight of hundreds of cat puns. The game unfolds into a beautiful series of stories about redemption, connection, and remembering.
How long have you been making games?
I made a choose-your-own-adventure game in HTML when I was 11, so I guess I’ve had the spirit for a while. But I only got serious about making games in 2019. It helped to have a background in writing and coding.
What tools do you like to use?
My favorite tool is Godot, which is a free, open source, general purpose game engine. I’ve been using it with Ink for narrative games and the workflow is so much smoother than what I did for Purrgatory. Ren’py’s also a great tool for making visual novels, especially if you don’t know how to code :)
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I mainly make story-based games, but I do have a soft spot for first person shooters, puzzle games, typing games, rhythm games, and point-and-click games. I love mashing up genres in new ways, too. Rhythm shooter? Cursor maze adventure? Chess visual novel? Yeah, why not.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
There’s a lot to love about making games. I like making up interesting characters and seeing how they vibe or clash with each other. I also love collaborating with others and seeing how our respective skills influence the final project.
What sucks is that I have pretty terrible executive function issues that make it hard to devote the months or years needed to make a sizable game. The two years I spent making Purrgatory involved a lot of hardship, procrastination, self-doubt, and depression. So that’s probably my least favorite thing. That, and bug fixing.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Believe it or not, I’m not that much of a gamer. Mostly I play games to hang out with my friends. I do have a few indie games I want to plug, though. Try Ghost Story by okboy (a.k.a. Niko, Jonny Andino, etc.), who played guitar for Purrgatory and is a wonderful and talented person. And also try Fuzz Dungeon by Jeremy Couillard, because I like it :3
Purrgatory is an adventure game set in a peaceful, labyrinthine afterlife. What inspired you to make it?
I’ve always enjoyed small, remote, and isolated settings. An abandoned cave, the middle of a desert, a deep space town, a post-apocalyptic commune. This kept leading me back to one idea which was more or less “making friends in a maze,” and that’s what Purrgatory ended up being. The concept was also greatly inspired by classic Flash point-and-click games like Daymare Town and Submachine.
Believe it or not, the afterlife and cat stuff all came later when I saw “purrgatory” and decided to base the entire game around a pun, ’cus that’s a totally normal thing to do.
This game won the “I can’t draw” jam (but it is beautiful!!), and you thank some art helpers in your parting thoughts. What was it like designing the underworld?
Thank you for the compliment! But, honestly, I kind of hated it. The month or two where I drew all the backgrounds was a period of my life where I was super depressed, so I’d drag myself out of bed to draw one or two rooms before feeling exhausted and stopping for the day. Recently I’ve come to find much more joy in drawing, but at the time I just wanted to get it done.
The nice thing is that I could draw literally whatever I wanted in each room, and figure out how to make it relevant to the story later. And since it was Purrgatory, I didn’t have to draw it particularly well, either. Complete creative freedom! Big shoutouts to my mom for helping me draw all of the little books in the library, though.
“I’ve always enjoyed small, remote, and isolated settings. An abandoned cave, the middle of a desert, a deep space town, a post-apocalyptic commune.”
I love every character, but Kyungsoon, the “languorous” hyena, is my favorite. How did you develop them all?
Kyungsoon is my favorite too!!
I always start with a very simple idea. So for Kyungsoon, it might have been “a girl who sits in one place, stares at a cat, and eats things.” Then I let the characters’ personality and background develop naturally as I write the story. Each line of dialog presents an opportunity to invent a new facet of their character or to subvert something we already know. So, maybe Kyungsoon likes to eat things because her father owned a restaurant and fed her scraps. Maybe she’s sullen and introverted because her parents didn’t support her dreams. Maybe she’s unexpectedly good with cats.
When I decided to take Purrgatory seriously, I actually sat down and tried to fully flesh out each character’s personality and backstory, because I was taught that’s the “correct” way to do it. But as the story progressed, my original plan for the characters didn’t feel true anymore. I would find them pushing against what I had assigned to them, wanting to develop in a different direction. So, I let them :)
What was it like to implement all the rooms and pieces and interactions? This is a big game!
Ack, do you know how long it took to delineate all the little objects in order to make them clickable?! There were also a ton of issues due to having five major subplots that all intertwine while progressing independently of each other. I also shot myself in the foot by haphazardly adding features in a way that made it frankly impossible to debug by the end of it. Looking back, I honestly can’t believe I finished the game.
I don’t even consider Purrgatory that big, but it was my first larger project, so I definitely learned a lot throughout the process. You can bet my future games will be better planned out and have systems that scale with size rather than becoming teetering towers of hacks and workarounds.
The game has been really well received. Do you have a favorite kind of feedback to hear from players?
I was honestly shocked by the reception to Purrgatory. Before release, I was fully at peace with the possibility that it would suck and no one would ever play it, and I was ready to just move on with my life. I’m sure many up-and-coming indie game developers are familiar with the feeling. So it was frankly kind of overwhelming when the reviews, comments, fanart, Let’s Plays, etc. started flooding in. I don’t know where all of you came from, but I really appreciate it.
I catch up on Purrgatory reviews every few weeks, so I’ve read every one of them, even the negatives ones and the ambiguously homophobic ones. People leave lots of frankly ridiculous compliments, but I think the ones I treasure most are the ones that say Purrgatory helped them through a hard time or changed their outlook somehow. My favorite is the one that says “I played this game now life feels better.” That alone makes all the work worth it.
