Valve’s Feline-Themed Game That Got Away

Former Valve designer Matt T. Wood has created a unique game called Little Kitty, Big City, which can be seen as the complete opposite of popular first-person shooters like Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Instead of a war-torn, post-apocalyptic setting with intense action and weapons, Little Kitty, Big City offers a third-person perspective in a vibrant and friendly metropolis, featuring lovable characters and possibly even a cute cat as the protagonist.

During nearly 17 years at Valve, Wood helped build and deliver the company’s most notable titles, including Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, CS:GO, and both Half-Life 2 episodes. He was a founding member of the CS:GO project and worked on the series for six years; he was instrumental in creating Portal 2’s co-op mode, and created choreography and fight scenes for Half-Life and Left 4 Dead. Level design was one of his specialties.

Wood left Valve in mid-2019 and today is the head of his own game development company in Seattle, Washington, Double Dagger Studios. He didn’t plan to start his own studio after Valve, and he certainly didn’t think he would build and publish a game about a cute cat himself. But she is, and it’s called Little Kitty, Big City.

“It’s really more of a cozy exploration,” Wood told ReturnByte. “There’s platforming in the game, but it’s very light platforming. It’s more about vertical exploration and exploring corners. I’ve done a lot of things in my career, but one of the things I spent a lot of time doing was level design in video games, so I’m very interested in creating spaces that it feels like fun to explore and sort through. to penetrate.”

Little Kitty, Big City has a Saturday morning cartoon feel with hand-animated scenes and a clean, friendly art style. The main character, Kit, has wide green eyes, inky fur and bat-like ears, and their task is to find a way home to an apartment complex in the middle of a busy downtown. However, procrastination is highly recommended. Little Kitty, Big City is an open world game full of adorable animals to befriend, people to bully, quests and hats.

Hats are decorative domes that come in a variety of shapes, including fish head, half-dressed corn on the cob, little devil ears, cowboy pose, hedgehog, and even some roots. Kitty’s face adorably pokes into the center of each hat and can be freely equipped throughout the game. Aside from a few unique holsters, the hats don’t have any stats attached to them – wearing a ladybug head doesn’t give Kitty movement speed, and a construction hat doesn’t increase armor. Mostly they exist to be cute.

“As a game designer, you sit down and go, what’s the point of this thing you’re doing?” Wood said. “You always need a function, a purpose, a reason to do something. I think 10 years ago I would have said, okay, the hats give you this ability, or, like, this whole game is tied to all of this. And while this is true for some hats, they are largely cosmetic. It was refreshing to come to the conclusion that no, these are just for fun.

Wood’s long history with Valve fleshes out his current role as the founder of an independent studio, and his work at the island-based company has helped shape his approach to game design.

Valve is a unique behemoth even in AAA mode. It owns Steam, which acts as a bottomless bank; it is a private company, so it has no shareholders to undermine; and is the steward of iconic franchises including Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Dota 2 (many of which are on Wood’s resume).

“Valve is not your typical big game studio,” Wood said. “You have a lot of autonomy and freedom to do things there. But you’re still kind of living in the direction that Valve is going.”

Valve’s internal structure has long been the subject of myth and legend among video game fans, with company founder Gabe Newell in the role of Messiah and the Valve Handbook for New Employees as its holy text. The handbook made its way online in 2012 and went viral for liberal-inspired corporate ideals — it outlined a flat hierarchy at Valve, suggesting employees had the ability to manage themselves and work on their dream projects whenever they wanted. This cemented Valve’s reputation as an extremely cool video game company in the public eye, and that perception still exists today.

In practice, this structure has resulted in an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. It’s a running joke that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 were released in 2007, Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009, and Portal 2 in 2011. In 2020, Valve debuted Half-Life: Alyx, VR -game, which is exclusive to the studio’s Index hardware. After ignoring an extremely annoying bot attack, the company released a TF2 update this summer that includes maps and resources made largely by the community. Meanwhile, Steam has been printing money while maintaining Valve’s death grip on the PC market.

When Wood talks about the fun and freedom he feels building Little Kitty in Big City, he compares it to the top-down rigidity and smug bureaucracy he experienced on Valve’s production line. This is how he described it:

“Valve talks a lot about being able to do what you want. And it’s like, well – that’s never true. You know, Valve has a direction and they have a runway. And so for me, it made me realize that the direction Valve was going in was not a place I wanted to be long-term. Because I had been there for a long time and they kind of sat on their laurels and didn’t seem to challenge themselves or take risks or do anything. Steam Makes a lot of money so they don’t really have to, but it wasn’t good for me. And after several years of trying to figure out how to manage it, I decided it was important for me to go make my own decisions for a while.”

Wood made it clear that he appreciated the opportunities and stability that Valve offered, and overall he called it a “good company.” It’s easy to see why so many talented game developers are drawn to Valve, a studio with unlimited resources, a laissez-faire management style, and a library of prestigious IP. Working at an established studio also means there are plenty of experts around to check your progress and give advice, and these are failsafes that Wood no longer has as an independent developer.

“It can be a little scary,” Wood said. “But it’s been great. I love working with a small team that focuses on a game where it’s different for us. It’s a challenge for me.”

Wood said that while he’s probably working more now, he also has more energy and passion for his projects than he did during his last five years at Valve. Little Kitty, Big City represents a set of Wood’s game design essentials, including the fact that it’s a small open world and has no combat. Double Dagger Studio now has seven full-time team members, plus a few contributors, and they all found each other naturally by digital-age standards—Wood shared early ideas for Little Kitty, Big City on Twitter, and interested developers got involved. contact.

“Initially I reached out to some of my colleagues who had already left Valve and they were interested, but like this was a common theme in reaching out to people who worked at Valve, is that most people leave Valve, they’re kind of done,” Wood said.

Despite the current growth of indie-focused publishers such as Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital, Private Division, Humble, Netflix and Raw Fury, Wood self-publishes Little Kitty under Big City Double Dagger Studio. That’s not to say he didn’t explore a potential partnership—he actually ended up in final deal meetings with one publisher in particular, but ultimately turned down the deal.

“It didn’t make any sense,” Wood said. “Because what they were able to do didn’t really justify the money they were going to take. And so it was really hard to find a publisher that made sense. I think the difference between where I was in my career and where someone maybe straight out of school would be , is that I left Valve with a chunk of money that I said, “I’m going to invest it in the company. .’ And so I didn’t have to rely on a publisher to spend $100,000 a year on development or whatever. I had the freedom and space to say no.”

This year alone, Little Kitty, Big City was released for Switch, had a successful run at Summer Game Fest, and is getting a fresh spin in the form of a Makeship campaign that offers a super cute Kitty plushie and a salmon-shaped zipper. – up catnip toy. The Double Dagger team finishes the game with Wood overseeing everything, no safety net in sight.

When we started talking, Wood described Little Kitty, Big City as Little in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, a game where a lost soul tries to find its way home and meets colorful characters along the way. This may be Kitty’s story, but at this point in her career, it also feels like Wood’s story.

Little Kitty, Big City is coming in 2024 to Switch and PC – via Steam, of course.