Cats Vs Chaos
Cats Vs Chaos is a canceled Godot project I started in 2025. It’s in the survivor-like genre, features a meta-progression shop, 7 playable characters, 11 weapons, 45 upgrades, and a 20-minute playable stage. While the original plan was much larger, I eventually released an early version.
Why was it canceled?
The first Git commit for this project was made on Feb 9, 2025. This was before even my first public project.
As it is one of my oldest projects, I was still learning core programming concepts during development, leading to catastrophic decisions. First of all, I didn’t know concepts like inheritance yet, meaning each weapon had its own script. Some scripts were also massive, with the player script being over 2000 lines!
When I started this project, I didn’t know much about coding. This meant a lot of the code was made by tutorials and sloppily put together, leading to the project becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Besides that, adding new stuff became increasingly harder and performance worsened.
On the plus side, I did get some systems I can reuse. For instance, I can pretty easily add the feedback system to a new project to let players voice their complaints more easily.
Besides that, I didn’t know if the project was really fun anymore. After 17 months of working I was kinda tired of seeing it, I remember enjoying it at first but I am not having that much fun playing anymore.
After a while the project was stuck in purgatory, barely getting any updates. Since development was basically already halted, I decided to finish up the last couple of systems and release it on itch.io.
So was it just a waste of time?
NO. Absolutely not! I learned a lot of basic programming concepts from this project, as it was a major part of me learning the core of GDscript. I also did some refactors, such as the shop now mostly running on a dictionary. While I could still refactor a lot, this would take quite a bit of time which I do not have.
Is there a future for this project?
I am not entirely ruling it out. While I doubt it’ll get much traffic and still has plenty of issues, if feedback is positive and there is actually a demand I’ll take a look into expanding it. While I don’t enjoy adding new content with how the systems work, this can be fixed with some big refactors, or I can just work with it. I am also still quite fond of the story and have plans for how I’d continue it.
