Cat Puncher Is Like Street Fighter II, but with Cats

Wellington-based rapper Tommy Ill (aka Tom Young) has spent the past six months creating a cat-themed parody of beloved 1990s arcade staple Street Fighter II, and he regrets nothing. Appropriately called Cat Puncher, the mobile game features playable cat characters based on Young’s real life feline friends.

Young grew up playing street fighting arcade games. “When I was kid I used to go down to the takeaway at the end of the street and sink money into Street Fighter II and Street Fighter VS X-Men,” he tells The Creators Project.

But despite his nostalgia for combo moves, Young initially envisaged the cat-themed game as a clone of another arcade staple—Pong. “The idea was that it would be two cats hitting a ball of yarn back and forth. It was kind of slow and boring, so on a whim I took the yarn out and just made them bash each other and it was much more fun,” he says. “The 90s fighting game sort of aesthetic just kind of seemed made sense after that.”

Cat Puncher is visually similar to Street Fighter II, but the gameplay is simplified. “I wanted to make a game that two people could easily play against each other on a touch screen, so I made the control scheme as simple and intuitive as possible,” Young says. “The player taps to jump, taps again to attack, and taps once again to do a super combo if their super bar is full. Attacks work as blocks as well, so there’s no tricky button presses really.”

All the cats in Cat Puncher are based on real cats that belong to Young’s friends, and the project was a labour of love—with Young painstakingly creating all the animations, backgrounds, music and sound effects himself. “When I started working on it I thought I’d have it done in a few weeks,” he says. “But it ended up taking six months…drawing animations for all the cats took a very long time, and then drawing all the backgrounds took even longer. Trying to figure out how to get the AI to play the game like a human would was a bit of a nightmare too.”

“Recording the announcer’s voice was pretty funny, I was sitting there yelling things like ‘Round one!’ and ‘Perfect!’ at the computer for an hour while my friend Jack laughed at me.”

Young used Figure, Ableton Live and FL Studio to put the game together. “It was quite a different process from making rap songs,” he says. “I’m used to working with samples and drum loops and things but I wanted the soundtrack to sound more electronic, not quite chiptune but sort of leaning in that direction.”

The rapper hopes to add more cat-themed moves to Cat Puncher in the future. “All the cats have a special super combo that they can use, but they are pretty standard and not particularly cat themed,” he says. “I'm thinking of adding new fighters, moves and stages later on, and I'm keen to add things like flaming hairballs and other stuff soon too.”

Cat Puncher is available for iOS and Android. You can watch the trailer here.

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