The Mischievous Thievery Of Jessica The Cat

Jessica the cat has been sneaking around the neighbourhood stealing people’s things. Only one detective can track her down and find the missing items. (It’s you! You’re the detective!)

The Mischievous Thievery Of Jessica The Cat is a small narrative-puzzle game that began as a prototype I built in Twine for Global Game Jam 2021. The 2021 theme was "Lost & Found". It was inspired by "My cat went to the neighbours to borrow a tiger plush toy :)", a video that gets thrown into everyone’s YouTube sidebar every few years. I have continued working on the game since then and the latest version (v1.0.1) is embedded above.

The game will launch in full screen mode. It is ~3.2 MB.

The Mischievous Thievery Of Jessica The Cat is an ongoing project I am using as a space to practise narrative writing, pixel art, and doing unusual things in Twine that the engine wasn’t particularly designed for.

Credits:

• Mandy J Watson (@mandyjwatson):
  Game design, narrative and writing, programming, art, music, and sound effects
• Fonts:
  Munro by Ten By Twenty (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1);
  Nevis by Ten By Twenty (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1); and
  Pixel Operator by Jayvee Enaguas/HarvettFox96 (Creative Commons Zero (CC0) 1.0 Universal).
• Additional Code:
  howler.js by James Simpson, GitHub contributors, and Twinery forum users (MIT Licence).

Software Used:

• Audacity, Base64.Guru, BeepBox, ChipTone, GIMP, Notepad, Twine.

Version 1.0+ Notes:
• I am still learning how to implement (complex) audio in Twine successfully so there may be some problems, either caused by Twine or certain web browsers that choose to do their own thing. If you do experience an audio problem please leave a comment that mentions your operating system, web browser, and browser version.
• The gods of randomisation have ensured that sometimes the game feels too difficult and sometimes the game feels too easy. I have tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, yet the perfect balance remains elusive.
• The game does not work in the Vivaldi browser at all. I don’t know why.