Summary
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, cat cafe simCalicoreleased on PC, Xbox, and Switch in the wake of the pandemic-era hit slice-of-lifeAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsin December 2020. It took almost three years, however, before the cat cafe opened on Sony’s consoles.
Calicosees players take control of a cat cafe and work to complete quests for the townsfolk while befriending animals for the cafe. Players can cook, enjoy fashion, and use their magical powers to modify their animal friends–making pets larger and smaller, for instance. This has made it not only a relaxing experience for adults but fun for kids as young as six, toutsPeachy Keen’s founder Kells.
Peachy Keen,Calico’s developer, worked with porting experts at Whitethorn Games to prepare the cozy life sim for a PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 debut. As the game hit Sony’s marketplace, Game Rant interviewed Kells and John Russell, the porting engineer from Whitethorn that worked on the PlayStation release.
We had originally planned to release it on all consoles! Our goal is to haveCalicoavailable in as many places as possible, so everyone has the option to play … We’re just so excited to be able to invite PlayStation holders to join in the fun ofCalico!
It did take time and effort to get to this point, though. Part of that journey was the feature expansion and bugfixes from the 2.0 version of the game, the Pawsome Edition, but another major part was the ways the game had to be reworked somewhat to look and feel the way Calico was meant to on Sony’s architecture. Kells’ studio worked closely with Russell identifying and making changes needed to bring the dream of a PlayStation release to life.
Russell spent a lot of time going through memory footprints and graphical outputs while working with Peachy Keen to tweak shaders. Shaders, in particular, can make amassive stylistic differencein games, so getting them right with the PlayStation release was critical for a game with such a strong focus on visual style.
He also did a deep dive on the HLSL (high-level shader language) and console documentation so that he could use that expertise to help Peachy Keen adapt their shaders to Sony’s system. He also used his own knowledge of 3D mathematics to help tweak the Calico shaders.
Calico’s greatest strength is that nothing is “out-of-the-box.” This gives it a unique style visually and in its gameplay systems. This also meant that adapting visual components (such as shaders) for certain render pipelines required a deeper level of technical knowledge than usual during the porting process. Fortunately, these kinds of challenges are the most satisfying part of the job.
That effort dovetails with the bugfixes and feature growth found inCalico’s Pawsome Edition to bring the vision of the cozy cafe to players across all major platforms, allowing PlayStation players to finally enjoy the realization of a fairly simple dream: a short-and-sweet game that allows for a vast amount of creativity after the credits have rolled. In a movereminiscent ofAnimal Crossing: New Horizons,Calicois less about rolling those credits and beating the game and more about measuring accomplishment in an endless, light-hearted world.
Calico was designed before other cat-centric games of the past several years had hit the market, so it was a space Kells was interested in exploring, and adding in the magical girl angle just made sense stylistically. And within that space, Kells identified that one of the most critical elements the game needed was a way to see oneself reflected in the world, to ensure meaningful. And now, PlayStation 4 and 5 owners will be able to experience that representation themselves.representation both through the character creator and NPCs.
My biggest priority with the character creator was representation. I wanted to make sure the larger body sliders weren’t just stretched versions of the skinnier shapes. Along with that, I wanted a good spread of hair types and skin colors … I designed the [NPCs] based on the type of people I know and love in real life, and that led to the spread of diverse characters we have. I thinkthe sapphic qualityjust comes from my own preferences.
Calicois out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
MORE:Best Xbox Games To Play If You Love Animal Crossing: New Horizons
