Pawpon

Pawpon's app icon
The shop at midnight, waiting for its keeper.
Two capsule machines in the shop, each with its own set of cats to collect.
A new cat! Pot Puss pops out of her capsule, a rare from the If I Fits, I Sits set.
Take over a little capsule shop on Lantern Row after the old keeper vanished mid-sentence.
Small capsules, new friends: every capsule holds a cat waiting to meet you.
42 cats in 7 sets. Turn each figurine around, name it and read its little story in the Catbook.
Give your cats a place on the shelf and watch the collection grow.
Mop, wipe the glass, fix jams and restock between pulls. Every job pays.
After the shift, walk home to your bedroom and the shelf your cats live on.
Real in-game screenshot (Pawpon is landscape-only; rotated to 1179x2556).
Real in-game screenshot (Pawpon is landscape-only; rotated to 1179x2556).

Official trailer: https://youtu.be/uqqOxqzEMK8

Inspiration

I'm an artist and a gamer, and I've always loved cats. I grew up with three of them, Mano, Dodo and Oreo, and Pawpon is partly made in their memory. Every cat in the game carries a little bit of them.

The other half is Japanese gacha. I love the thrill of those capsule machines: putting a coin in, turning the handle, and not knowing who's inside until it pops open. Most mobile gacha games turn that into a "pull x10" button and a price tag. I wanted the real feeling back, the one you get standing in front of the machine, and I wanted a collector where money never buys a random pull. Paying can get you there faster, but everything that improves your odds can also be earned by playing.

What it does

Pawpon is a cozy first-person game for Android. You take over the night shift at a small capsule shop on Lantern Row. The old keeper, M., left in the middle of a sentence, and nobody knows why.

A pull that plays out in your own hands. Tap PULL and, in first person, your hands drop the token in the slot, work the joystick, and the claw grabs a capsule, drops it down the chute and twists it open. The claw is a ritual, not a skill test: the machine's published odds pick the cat, so nobody can practise or pay their way around them. Rarer capsules are heavier and can slip, but a slip never costs you a token, and the third try always lands.
42 cats in 7 sets, from common to mythical. Each one is a little 3D figurine you can turn around in the Catbook, give a name, and put on your bedroom shelf.
A real shift. Between pulls you mop, wipe the glass, clear jams, restock and fix machines to earn Moon Credits. You trade those for tokens, pay the night's bills and close up at 06:00.
Somewhere to go. M.'s story comes out night by night through notes and postcards. Eight machines open up as you work, including the Wonder Exchange, which holds every regular cat at once. Spare copies turn into Moon Dust, which rescues the exact cat you're missing, and the Hush, a back room, lets you pick the exact legendary or mythical you want.
Honest odds. Every machine shows its full odds before you spend anything, including the guarantees at 25, 60, 120 and 240 pulls. The same numbers are on pawpon.app/odds.
Your shop, safe in the cloud. From version 1.1.1 you play as a guest or sign in with email or Play Games, and your cats, currencies and purchases are kept in the cloud (Firebase), so they follow you to a new phone.

How I built it

I made Pawpon on my own, in Godot 4.7.2 with GDScript, for Android 7.0 and up.

Everything inside the game is made with code, written by me with AI tools as help along the way. That covers the shop, the machines, all 42 cats, the hands and every sound. I build the 3D models in Blender through its Python API, and my own tools bake the lighting and create the audio. As an artist I wanted full control over the look, and doing it this way meant every piece shares the same soft, toy-like style. The store icon and illustrations were made with an image generator, using my in-game models as reference.

Payments run through RevenueCat on Google Play: a one-time Nightlight Pass, a starter pack and fifteen currency packs. Prices in the game are the real localized store prices, and Restore Purchases brings the Pass back on any phone signed in with the same Google account.

Challenges I ran into

Making a gacha that pays for itself without selling luck. The easy money in this genre is selling pulls. I didn't want that, so tokens are earned only by working the shift. What I sell saves time instead: opening a machine sooner, rescuing a cat you're missing, or picking one outright at the Hush.
An old phone that caught everything. My test phone is a 2017 Oppo A71. The game kept closing on it, and it turned out the phone was running out of memory, so I moved all the sound and image generation out of the game into files built ahead of time. Its first launch took over four minutes to prepare the graphics, so I trimmed that work and gave it an honest progress bar. On newer Galaxy phones it takes 15 to 35 seconds, once.
A shop too heavy to draw. Grouping the capsule piles and simplifying machines you aren't using cut the drawing work at the entrance nearly in half.

What I'm proud of

A capsule game where money never buys a random pull, where every model and sound inside it is built by code, and that runs on a phone most studios would never test on.

What I learned

Test on the worst real phone first. A few of my "fixes" did nothing until I measured them on the device.

What's next

More cat sets and seasonal albums
More of M.'s story, more shop jobs, minigames and characters to meet
Decorating and upgrading the shop's design and layout
Cat companions that follow you around the shop
Bringing your own cat into the game: turn a photo of your pet into a companion and collectible (a paid feature)
Optional rewarded ads through RevenueCat Ads, already built and switched off for now