The cozy cat game that escaped from Valve

engadget.com:

Imagine a game that might be described as the opposite of Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. These are first-person shooters set in wartorn, post-apocalyptic cities, so their inverse might be a third-person game with no weapons at all, set in a warm, buzzing metropolis of friendly characters, maybe starring an adorable cat. Weirdly, the result could look a lot like Little Kitty, Big City, the first project from former Valve designer Matt T. Wood.

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

Wood left Valve in mid-2019, and today he’s the head of his own game development company in Seattle, Washington, Double Dagger Studio. He didn’t plan on starting his own studio post-Valve, and he certainly didn’t think he’d be building and self-publishing a game about an adorable cat. But, he is, and it's called Little Kitty, Big City.

“It really is more about cozy exploration,” Wood told Engadget. “The game has aspects of platforming, but it's very light platforming. It's more about exploring vertically, and exploring nooks and crannies. I've done a lot of things throughout my career, but one of the things I spent a lot of time doing was level design in video games, so I have a lot of personal interest in creating spaces that feel fun to explore, to sort of poke around in.”

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