Cat Cafe Manager Idle

🌟 Inspiration

I've wanted to make a cat game for a long time, and this was finally the moment where the tools available matched the vision I had in my head. With AI helping me prototype faster and explore ideas visually, I felt confident I could bring a Cat Café world to life—cute, cozy, and full of personality.

🐾 What It Does

Cat Café is a relaxed, cozy management game focused on interacting with adorable cats and decorating your dream café.

Your main job?

✨ Play with your cat — complete with haptic purring feedback
✨ Decorate your café — wallpapers, floors, furniture, seasonal themes
✨ Adopt more cats & collect accessories

Meanwhile, your Waiter NPC tirelessly serves customers, generates income, and helps you progress through the game. As you level up, you unlock a steady stream of rewards:

New cat accessories
New player outfits & headwear
New wallpapers & floors
More cats to adopt
More furniture options

The focus is calm progression, cute interactions, and satisfying customization.

🛠 How We Built It

This project is heavily AI-assisted and built using multiple prototype worlds, each exploring a different system: NPC logic, progression flow, cat interactions, and environmental design.

Key features include:

Waypoints & Navmesh for server NPCs and customer NPCs
Cat NPC system using animated FBXs and pose swapping
Extensive haptics: cat purrs, UI clicks, reward feedback, interactions
- Rich UI system for:
Café customization
Hiring additional staff
Adopting cats
Camera controls & smooth UI animations
- Custom avatar animations for cat petting and NPC seating
Player avatar outfit overrides
Attachable player and cat items
Focus interaction mechanics
Broadcast camera, attachable to a cat for a “cat POV”
Cozy, modular environment designed for fast seasonal décor swaps
Leaderboards and Quests

AI helped greatly with ideation, icon generation, code structuring, UI iteration, and speeding up the more technical or repetitive steps.

⚠️ Challenges

Troubleshooting NPC navigation and coordination
Integrating multiple independently built systems at the last minute
Testing progression logic in a world that doesn’t reset cleanly
Balancing complexity with time limits while still making everything feel polished
I had debug ui that I turned off and re-published for the final version, but it still didn't go away from the publish version
Last moment noticed the NPC unexpectedly changed their appearance I spent time designing
I didn't end up having time to design unisex clothing for clothes override, so everyone above level 2 would get a female outfit

🎉 Accomplishments

I’m proud that the world I imagined finally exists—even if this is just the first version. It captures the cozy atmosphere, the satisfying progression, and the cat-centric charm I wanted.

📚 What We Learned

How to successfully orchestrate multiple NPC systems in a single world
How to blend UI, animations, haptics, VFX, and progression into one cohesive experience
How to collaborate with AI as a creative partner across art, logic, and design

🚀 What’s Next

There are so many interactions I still want to add for the cats—playful behaviors, richer animations, smarter AI. When animation switching becomes supported, I plan to create more advanced cat interaction sequences and expand the reward catalog even further, implement unisex clothes override for rewards.

The long-term vision includes: