If you haven't yet immersed yourself in the world of Catmaze, now is the time! [previewyoutube=23GQ791dGK8;full][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube=EFPN80TBVdw;full][/previewyoutube] Immerse yourself in a world drawn by neural network and invented by a person. Make decisions to change the course of a complex story. Find an answer to the question: what is "humanity" in a world where a mechanical heart can also break? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2241450/Mechahearts/ Mechanical dolls are already able to mingle freely and undetected amidst humans. They can buy human skin to feel the wind on a face. They can buy a human tongue to have the sense of taste. They can buy eyes to see right through you, human: a predictable and fragile being stumbling through a dark time of change.
In this visual novel, you will take on the role of a creature whose nature you will determine yourself: whether you turn out to be a human or a mechanical doll depends on the decisions you make. You will interact with more than 30 unique characters, and your choices will direct the course of the dialogues to build complex relationships with all the NPCs and help define yourself. Hundreds of small dialogue options will determine how your friends or enemies will behave at the next unexpected plot twist. Other people's actions, provoked by your remarks and actions, will govern which of the ten game chapters you visit and which of the many endings you will come to. Players will find something new every time they play, as their own doubts about their natures lead them down varying courses in the story.
You start a career as a criminal, but a simple heist gone wrong throws you into a war with powerful enemies. In order to survive, you will have to choose your friends carefully: take care that your words and actions earn the respect of the characters most sympathetic to you, or else your story will end with a knife in the back.
A flexible "chronology" system will allow you to load any of the key scenes to give you the opportunity to explore the intricate story from all sides and emerge alive from a series of intrigues and betrayals.
None of the characters will tell you the whole truth at once; no one will inspire confidence; everyone can betray you; and anyone could have a mechanical heart ticking in their chest. The whole game was drawn with the assist of Midjourney. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2241450/Mechahearts/

The game didn't lie in a dusty and dark corner all this time, but kept getting better and better: Catmaze went through hundreds of little changes and got a little bit neater - all the changes "polished" this game a little. - Fixed tons of sounds; - Interfaces have become more accurate; - Some textures were Redrawn; - The physics of some objects were changed; - Balance was slightly adjusted; - Fixed a lot of small bugs that you did not know about! - Lots of text improvements, especially in English and Japanese translations. Next important news is that the game has been released on all the modern consoles - and now you can... buy it twice to enjoy a fairy adventure on another device! [previewyoutube=Xo3XfYGJ1xk;full][/previewyoutube] And also, after active discussions with the community, I decided to provide access to the version of the game in which the portraits of the characters have not yet been changed - Alesta looks much older there, and her aunt looks much younger. Many other portraits are still "new" in the because new ones look actually much better In order to access this version, you need to select Catmaze in the application list in the Steam client, right-click on it, select "settings" - "betas" and select the "originalart" branch there. The game will update and the portraits will change. If you come across a bug, problem, or just want to ask a question - I'm always glad to see you in the Catmaze community!

There are a bunch of small changes I hid in this update. All of them, when put together, bring a lot of improvements! What's new? - Added a button to change ranged, melee familiar and a button to change equipped item; - Added four new languages: French, German, Spanish, Japanese; - Added new portraits for some characters (I will not argue, I failed in drawing some of the previous portraits I failed); - New English translation! What had changed? - Improved controls in the sections with a wolf; - No more death from a single touch of the flame of Chernobog; - Improved controls in the broom section; - Puzzles in Nav are much simpler from this moment; - Some sounds were replaced; - Some bonus items were redrawn; - Fixed a bunch of minor bugs, which does not make much sense to list. The game gets better with your help! Thanks! I hope that with this update I did not spawn even more bugs, but if I did, please report about them in the appropriate thread!

Hello everyone! Finally this day has come and my third game - Fearmonium - is able to purchase on Steam! [previewyoutube=FMqDePE7CTU;full][/previewyoutube] Now everyone can try to take an unusual role of a phobia in the mind of a teenage boy! The most important thing for me now - your feedback. I really wish to make this game as good as possible and I can do it only with help of your words! Your reviews and support now are super important for me and for the game. What I'm planning next is strongly connected with Catmaze: as I gained more experience while working on Fearmonium now I want to turn back around to my previous game and bring some improvements to it. Stay tuned!

After hard work I finally added Linux support! Currently you can play Catmaze on Linux x64, Steam OS, Windows and Mac. If you find some problems with launching - feel free to report about them and I fix them as soon as possible. Also I fixed a few bugs some bugs you guys reported me about. Feel free to let me know if you find any new stuff I need to fix. Thank you for playing! Also don't forget to take a look on my new project that is currently in development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/

The answer is psychedelic metroidvania where you play as a phobia.
Hello everybody, my name is Slava, Im from Russia, and I am preparing the release of the third game that I made almost alone: music is the only piece Im not responsible for. I make everything else myself. Having only a masters degree in psychology, I dived into game development five years ago. I think its worth explaining a little about how it happened to bring a better understanding of what is going on in here. A small introduction will help to adequately perceive everything that jumps and flashes in the recently published trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovoxPGS1AqQ&feature=youtu.be I was interested in psychology even at school, and not for typical reasons: I was not motivated by the desire to deal with my own demons or to understand people around me. At the age of 17, I went to programmers university preparatory courses. There I was surrounded by guys in knitted sweaters and with virgin moustaches on thoughtful faces. The next day I was brought to courses in a pedagogical university, where I was the only guy in the audience. Young girls all around me, and the audience full of fragrant scents of women's perfumes. Stunned by what I saw, I confidently decided to study in this paradise. Thats how I began to break my life.
In my career of a psychologist, the most reasonable decisions were: to drop dropping the psychology to hell; silently leaving graduate school; retirement from a kind of a foster home, where I worked for three years after graduating from the magistracy and fully devoting myself to game development. I made these decisions not because I wasnt interested in psychology anymore - on the contrary, while I was studying, I began to penetrate the structure of human minds. However, this profession did not allow me to express myself creatively. I always wanted other people to enjoy the worlds that were born in my mind. Knowledge of psychology helped in building my own life and in creating fictional characters, but its difficult to call it a high-paying profession in Russia. It would be possible to strive to open my office, but my heart wasnt in it, and Ive chosen another way.
Job in a social institution forced to constantly look for a part-time work. Although I enjoyed spending time with children from difficult families, moving from my parents and meeting with my second half forced me to earn a little more than I used to. The payments in social institutions in Russia are very-very low. I couldnt do anything except digging in peoples minds with a bottle of whiskey, but I was familiar with Photoshop. I knew how to draw using Macromedia Flash, so I decided to find ways to apply these skills. And I found it. People often look for artists on the game development forums, and those who had a severely limited budget doesnt need particularly luxurious graphics - I could easily draw a pair of sprites for 5 euros. My desire to get at least some money helped me to improve my drawing skills. I really didnt know how to draw. I simply drew and redrew everything until it satisfied the customer.
Thats what I used to draw back then. A year later, I realised that I could completely create graphics for my own game. I only needed to find money for a programmer. The whole thing was in the distant 2014th year, and nobody was aware of the coming indie apocalypse. The games were coming out at a crazy oace, and the tools for creating them became easier and more accessible. I saw that artists are no less in demand than programmers, and came to the conclusion that if I had improved my drawing skills to a level allowed me to create a whole game in two years, then how long would it take me to learn to code too?
It took no time at all. I installed Construct 2 and things rushed. Two years later, my first game came out: Reflection of Mine. It was a dark and hardcore puzzle about a girl with multiple personality syndrome. I chose this topic because I wanted to use all my knowledge and skills in this project, and by that time I was the most advanced in psychology. And the engine... Almost nobody takes Construct 2 seriously. This is an engine for creating two-dimensional HTML5 games, but when I started working with it, I didnt even know what HTML5 is. I saw that dragging the windows in C2 produces quite a working exe file, the launch of which opens the doors for people to the world invented by me and introduces to the characters invented by me. What else do I need?
I still do not know. The games that I created with Construct 2 work! They are played by thousands of people around the world, and all the difficulties and bugs that some players suffered from were caused not by a crooked engine, but by my own hands. I didnt face any problem that I could not fix in the future. Also I didnt see any 2D-game mechanic that I could not recreate with Construct 2. Now, however, the engine is dying, Construct 3, in my opinion, is horrible, and since the company making this product is moving into the abyss, at some point I will remove Construct 2 from my PC forever.
So what am I working on now? Fearmonium is a psychedelic metroidvania, where the player takes under control an unpleasant memory, seeking to become a phobia. The visual style is not inspired by the game Cuphead. To be honest, Im not a big fan at all - the eternal battles with bosses are more tiring than pleasing to me. But still, I admit that this is a great game. Im just a fan of exploration and I suffered from lack of it in there. Cuphead's visual style emerged from the twentieth-century classic animation, and my inspiration grows from there too. However, I have never been a fan of the drooling intensity of short cartoon films about Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. Although I was fascinated by the frame-by-frame animation in these creations, I never found them inspiring. And just before working on Fearmonium, I understood why: it was all about the music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31j4DIpgY9U I saw several unofficial videos of the musician named GHOSTEMANE - the authors took cuts from the cartoons of the first half of the twentieth century, put some camera shake and glitches on it and mixed them with aggressive and dark music, reminiscent of my beloved Witch house. This setting hooked me up. I chose a dark palette, a dark plot, dressed it all in the style of old cartoons and began to work. The very procedure for bringing the game to its current state was as follows: in about two months I created a small demo version, where I had already chosen the visual style and gameplay. In February, I presented it at the White Nights conference in Berlin to look at the reaction of the players and to understand whether I was moving in the right direction. It turned out that in the right one. From February to this day, I worked specifically on the trailer, and, frankly speaking, I turned the project file into complete chaos from broken levels and a real mess from objects called sprite1, sprite2, sprite100, but order was never my thing, and I'm sure Ill get away with this.
Phobias arent growing from the void. Most often they are born from disturbing memories and bloom on the compost of negative states. The memory can be perceived by us as worrisome even without any obvious unpleasant factors: a person can see a clown or a spider under absolutely normal (seemingly) conditions, but these images are so firmly stuck into his head that it can transform into a serious neurosis. The unconscious will take care of this. Fearmonium begins with a story about a fair where a boy named Jimmy saw clowns, and although he didnt like them very much, he didnt expect to wake up in the middle of the night from their appearance in his dream. Sleep has an important function of squashing down memories of the past day. Things we saw during the day affect the things that we will see while we sleep. A person doesnt store memories in the form of text files or photographs, they dont even look like a movie: we think in images. And how one or another image is treated depends only on the person. Absolutely same images can mean very different things to different people.
Bright images, seen by Jimmy at the fair, became his "protectors" when player converted his dream into a nightmare. That is why the first enemies we met were all that he liked from the previous day. Interaction with enemies is not limited to waving a hammer. Two properties of phobias are involved in the battle with memories. First: neuroses affect the images in our memories. A patient suffering from a phobia will hardly be sure whether he saw a spider or a clown a year ago. It will seem to him that the subject of his fear was always somewhere near.
Secondly the phobia is not related to a specific item, it relates to a whole class of items. All that is associated with clowns becomes painful for Jimmy. People who are afraid of spiders will not divide them into types and panic from the appearance of some specific spider, they will be frightened by everything that their minds connect with spiders. In this way, we fake Jimmys memories by turning enemies into balloons that Jimmy strongly associates with clowns. Where there was something light in his memory bam and a balloon appears. In addition, we will meet other clowns in the memories of Jimmy that the boy has seen in throughout his life, and take them into our "army", using these memories as weapons against bright images.
But the very purpose of the game is not to drive poor Jimmy crazy. A phobia is not always as destructive as it may seem, and this is the main idea that I want to convey. Neurosis doesnt appear from a good emotional state. Stress, constant anxiety - a great compost for depression and phobias. Jimmy's life is not wonderful at all. His consciousness was already a chaos before our appearance. I will not go into the details of his life that drove Jimmy into the abyss of misfortunes, but I will say that in his situation, no one except Jimmy himself can save the situation.
And one of the features of phobias: the displacement of the objective fears. And "objective" does not mean "reasonable." For example, being late to school is an objective fear, but even such a minor phenomenon can be accompanied by an absurd amount of stress. Our indecision is often caused by the ridiculous amount of experience over trifles, which are perceived as something very important. With the presence of a real, severe neurosis, trifles are again turned into trifles, and only clowns seem to be a serious threat.
I briefly retold some things that I reveal through Fearmonium. The plot will affect the nature of depression, and standard methods of protection against neurosis, and a bunch of things that I caught at lectures at the university. But I remember an important rule - the best story in the game is the one that can be ignored. Fearmonium may well attract someone with funny pictures and dynamic gameplay, but scare off with its internal seriousness. So, in the game it will be impossible to get confused even if you dont get a grasp of all the subtleties of human consciousness, and the educational part of the game is purely optional. I believe that games can say more than click on X to win, and I try to develop this idea. Dont forget to add Fearmonium to your wishlist! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/

I never stopped making games - and I wanted to thank all the players that supported Catmaze! Your feedback and your positive energy gave me strength to develop my third game that is finally got a steam page! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1068360/Fearmonium/ However, I'll never stop support Catmaze - so feel free to let me know about any issues you faced.

Here goes Catmaze 1.06! It's the most serious update I made. What's new? - Character's speed is now much faster - Character's physics improved. That made controls less "clunky" - Fixed jumping system near the edge of the platforms. Now the player have a possibility to jump a few moments after Alesta begins to fall. That makes the character more responsible - Screens changes three times faster from this moment - Fixed a bug when Alesta stuck in the chests - Fixed a few more minor issues I'm still working on Catmaze, so feel free to report about any bugs you find - I want to make this game as good as possible!

Im glad to announce that Catmaze is now available on Simplified Chinese. Also last weeks I worked on optimization to minimize the risk of freezes and slowdowns that some players faced. I hope the game will work faster, but still its not the limit.
Please report me about any bugs - I will try to fix them as soon as I can so you'll be able to enjoy Catmaze!

- Fixed the camera behavior on moving platforms, now it moves with the character. - Fixed some rooms where player was able to stuck in the walls

Here goes a new update! What we've got in here? 1. Finally - a thing that many of you asked for - "load" button on the Game Over screen. Now you can waste only 2 seconds to load your game instead of previous 2.5 seconds :) 2. More important update: in the previous version of the game when Alesta upgraded her speed it influenced only on her running speed. Now it influences on the jumping speed too. I rebuild many rooms in the game to prevent unexpected gamebreaking shortcuts. Also that difference in the "ground speed" and "air speed" was the reason why some of you told me about choppy controls. 3. I fixed some more grammar mistakes, thank you guys for letting me know about them. 4. I'm still trying to catch a random bug when familiar starts to attack behind Alesta. I hope now I finally nailed it. 5. Fixed tons of minor bugs that you reported about. Many thanks! 6. Now some news about low framerate that was noticed on some machines. However It's a rare stuff, currently I made everything that is possible to make the game run perfectly on any PC. The problem is not in the hardware, it's in JavaScript optimization (by the way in some cases putting nw.exe in Windows 8 Compatibility mode solves this problem). But still this is not an option. I'm working on putting Catmaze on the brand new version of the engine and try to use a new runtime. I can't promise will I finish this work in a week or in a month, but I definitely will do it.
Please report me about any bugs - I will try to fix them as soon as I can so you'll be able to enjoy Catmaze!

During last few days I've been adding a dozen of small features and now I finally can call it a second patch. Here goes a list of changes: - Added some more markers on the map. - Changed the sound of collecting the white spheres - - Reduced the chance of situations in which the player, falling into the water, instead of appearing on the edge of the platform, fell down again. - In some cases after the battle with Liho appeared an invisible wall. Now it's fixed. - Fixed the control over the wolf. Now player doesn't fall down while taking damage on the wall. - In some cases player was able to leave the room with Igosha in the Automn forest. Now it fixed. - Fixed the "cutting" of the text in the diary and in the equipment window. - Snowman stopped wasting player's MP if Lesavka was equipped. - Now player isn't able to stuck after the dialog with the blacksmith. - Svar shoots farther since now. - Fixed the barrels physics. Sometimes they stopped worked in Nav. - Now player is able to unequip a potion. - Fixed the controls during upgrading the amulets - analog stick now works even there. - Fixed a rare situation when player saw a random number of symbols instead of the normal text. - Now in the fight with Ghost Boss his minions can commit suicide when there are tons of them on the screen. - Fixed the situation when the player was able to "stuck" in the arm during the fight with the last boss. - Fixed the situation when 13th page of the diary didn't open. Please report me about any bugs - I will try to fix them as soon as I can so you'll be able to enjoy Catmaze

Few, it was a little bit hard to survive :) Thanks everyone for the feedback! Here is some updates I made: - I put a key in the room near the cave where player should follow the cat with glowing ears (key will appear near the left entrance to the cave in the room with barrel); - Added some new markers on the map that show where you can find feather of the FireBird (allows you to see in the darkness, marker appears after talk with Voronikha) and where you can find shooting familiar (marker appears after you get feather of the FireBird) and marker that shows the first boss (appears after you receive a weapon to fight him); - Changed position of some monsters and spikes; - Solved problems with analog stick in Voronikha's shop; - Solved problem with opening the doors in case you changed default controls on keyboard; - Fixed jumping mushrooms; - Character now moves a little bit faster from the very begging. - Fixed some mistakes in some dialogs; - Added some markers that shows where player can find Svetozara's cats and Chernobog altair's (markers appears after you take these quests); - I tried to improve perfomance a little bit. I hope it will help; - Fixed controls from keyboard while flying. Please report me about any bugs - I will try to fix them as soon as I can so you'll be able to enjoy Catmaze.

I'm glad to announce that page with Catmaze OST appeared: https://store.steampowered.com/app/860140/Catmaze__Soundtrack/ Expecte Amour - a talented Russian musician - made a perfect job. Check the video I made for the most dark tracks on this album: https://youtu.be/rPCXrEoA6Gc Also you can support him and pre-order OST from here: https://expecteamour.bandcamp.com/album/catmaze-soundtrack

I'm glad to announce that the game is done! Here is the final trailer for Catmaze - there you will find a release date! https://youtu.be/23GQ791dGK8