A cozy medieval cat guild management game. Recruit cats, take jobs, solve puzzles, and build your guild from a lone stray to a renowned clowder.
Play now: clowderandcrest.com
Listen to the soundtrack: Clowder & Crest Suno playlist
A hybrid daily-life sim and minigame anthology, framed as a Fire Emblem-style support drama between cats. You play the founding Wildcat of a fledgling guild, recruit other breeds, take jobs from the town board, and survive a 7-chapter narrative arc that builds from "stray under a tarp" to a Church Inquisition. Every job is a minigame; every cat has stats, mood, and bond conversations with the rest of the guild.
14 distinct minigame types, each authored against the design pillars of its genre. They're staggered across the chapter unlocks so the player learns the vocabulary one piece at a time:
| # | Minigame | Genre | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chase | Maze-chase arcade (Pac-Man) | 2-dog pack with distinct AI archetypes (Tracker + Ambusher), Pac-Man-style ghost combo on catnip, archetype-specific death messages |
| 2 | Hunt | Whack-a-mole / reaction | Speed escalation, fake-out rats (peek + double-pop), poison rats with red tint, 5-chain combo bonus |
| 3 | Sokoban | Crate pushing | 8 themed hand-crafted levels with named concepts ("First Push", "Three Locks", "Pushed Out"...), BFS-validated, restart button |
| 4 | Courier Run | Endless runner / lane switcher | Linear speed escalation curve, 9 obstacle "phrases" instead of pure random spawns, 4 mission types per run, juice on lane changes/pickups/hits |
| 5 | Brawl | Top-down action | Telegraphed rat windups, hit-stop on kill, Skirmisher rat type with lunge attack, boss phase 2 transition at 50% HP, wave foreshadowing |
| 6 | Patrol | Attention management | Continuous threat escalation curve, prowler intruders as a second upkeep type, relight cooldown forcing triage, lantern-loss tracking |
| 7 | Nonogram | Picross / grid logic | 13 hand-crafted thematic images (cat face, fish, lantern, sitting cat), constraint-propagation validator, NO penalty feedback (pure deduction), undo button |
| 8 | Ritual | Sequence memory (Simon) | Per-candle pentatonic tones for dual-channel encoding, speed escalation across rounds, adaptive 1.4× slowdown on failure, near-fail messaging |
| 9 | Scent Trail | Hot/cold deduction | Exact Manhattan distance numbers (not buckets), Mastermind-style remote probes, constraint-ring overlay on revealed tiles |
| 10 | Slide Blocks | Constraint-satisfaction (Rush Hour) | 6 named themed puzzles ("Gridlock", "Three Locks"...), load-time BFS validation auto-corrects par drift, PERFECT! callout, axis-arrow indicators on blocks |
| 11 | Fishing | Reel-in tension | Three-phase structure (approach → bite → catch), 5 fish behaviors driving zone motion (steady/darting/diver/runner/lazy), 4-tier rarity system |
| 12 | Pounce | Projectile physics (Angry Birds) | Breed-specific mid-flight abilities (Power Shot, Heavy Drop, Triple Split, Whirlwind...), wood/stone/glass material variety, 4 hand-crafted structure templates |
| 13 | Heist | Lock picking | Per-ring "set" state with distinct sparkle SFX, counter-clockwise rotation via tap-side detection, trap notches on hard difficulty |
| 14 | Stealth | Top-down stealth | Graduated detection (alert + pursuit, not instant fail), grass-recovery loop, ghost run reward layer, alert spreading to nearby guards |
Plus the Dungeon Run roguelike meta-loop (Ch.5+) that chains random minigame floors with persistent HP, inter-floor upgrade picks (Slay-the-Spire model), and a Hades-style reactive narrative driven by run history.
- 6 cat breeds (Wildcat, Russian Blue, Tuxedo, Maine Coon, Siamese, Bengal) with PixelLab-generated pixel art — idle (4 directions), walk (6 frames × 4 dirs), scratch, sit, eat, sleep
- 35 jobs across 6 categories — Pest Control, Courier, Guard, Sacred, Detection, Shadow (chapter-gated)
- 7 chapters of narrative — stray, founding, Rat Plague, learning, established, Rival Guild, Inquisition
- Bond system — all 15 breed pairs, 48 conversation scripts (45 pair + 3 group), Fire Emblem-style C/B/A ranks with stat-grant rewards on rank-up
- Reputation system (Crest/Shadow) — Sacred + Guard work builds Crest, Detection builds Shadow; affects recruit costs, daily income, and bond growth
- Guildhall + 3 unlockable rooms — 15 furniture items, drag-to-rearrange, walk-into-furniture stat boosts
- Town map — explorable 8×10 grid with buildings, stray cats, walking NPCs
- Real-time day cycle — 5-minute days, dawn-to-night phases, time-of-day town art
- Daily wishes, traveling merchant (every 3rd day), rotating festivals (every 7 days)
- 3 save slots with forward migration (saves never destroyed on updates)
- Guild journal — chapter beats, recruits, level-ups, bond rank-ups, dungeon runs
- 14 music tracks + 22 sound effects + rain ambience (most via ElevenLabs)
- Native Android features (Capacitor build) — haptic feedback wired into every minigame's emotional beats, pause-on-background lifecycle so the day timer doesn't drain when the app is closed, daily "your cats are waiting" return notification, dark status bar matching the game theme
- Day of Rest — in-universe minigame archive unlocked through play. Each of the 14 minigames appears as a "memory" card the first time the player completes it in a job; tapping a card replays the game in a no-stakes sandbox (no fish, no XP, no penalties). Lives behind the menu so it never competes with the campaign's pacing. A hidden showcase entry (
?showcase=1URL parameter on web, five quick taps on the title-screen crest on web + APK) loads a fully-unlocked demo save for portfolio reviewers - Resilient playtest harness — every minigame has a
test/*-playtest.mjsscript with hard timeouts, process group cleanup, and direct-method verification
Runtime
- Phaser 3 + TypeScript (canvas game scenes)
- HTML/CSS overlays (UI chrome — bottom nav, panels, dialogues)
- Vite (dev server + production build)
- Capacitor (Android packaging)
- Apache + Let's Encrypt (web deploy)
Built with
- PixelLab — AI pixel art (idle, walk, scratch, sit, eat, sleep animations × 6 breeds)
- Midjourney — illustrated dialogue portraits (5 expressions × 6 breeds)
- ElevenLabs — sound effects
- Suno — 70-track shared-leitmotif soundtrack (35 scenes × 2 variants)
- Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.6 — primary code authoring + design dialogue
- Codex CLI with GPT-5.4 Codex — secondary code authoring lane (
todo/codex-todo.md) - Gemini CLI with Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview — third coding lane (
todo/gemini-todo.md)
npm run dev # Dev server on port 3200
npm run build # Type-check + production build to dist/Each minigame has a Playwright-based playtest:
timeout 150s node test/chase-playtest.mjs
timeout 150s node test/sokoban-playtest.mjs
timeout 150s node test/brawl-playtest.mjs
# ...one per sceneSee CLAUDE.md for full project structure, scene-by-scene mechanic notes, and design decisions.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — See LICENSE for details.