Screenshot Saturday Sundays: cat cafés, cute cities, and pixel plants

I love Screenshot Saturday, Twitter’s weekly tag for game developers to throw up images and gifs (mostly gifs, but that’s not alliterative) of their works in progress. I love it so much that I’ve gathered together some of my favourites so that we can coo over them together. Within: a magical girl cat café, hyperactive sheep, and a very calm tree in what looks to be a much less tranquil game.

Calico is an upcoming cat café management sim with the goal “no animals that you can't pet.” I’m automatically in. It’s not just cats either, there are “raccoons, deer, dogs, turtles, red pandas, foxes,” and more planned. Also people, but not just any people. Witches, magical girls, and if the gif they shared this week is anything to go by, owl people.

Calico is scheduled to release next year, but first they’re planning a Kickstarter campaign starting on April 2nd. You can see a whole bunch more gifs, including flying cats, cats big enough to ride, and cats clipped through people’s faces, on their website.

Survival city builder Arclands has a lot of planned features, as outlined in its itch.io development log. As well as creating and growing a settlement, you’ll need to manage citizens, collect resources, explore to find ancient artefacts, and defend yourself and your work from attack.

But more importantly, there are sheep, and they go fast.

I don’t know whether this will make it to the game’s eventual release, but regardless it and the rest of the art style are adorable. I could watch those little puffs of chimney smoke all day. Developer Jon Keller says that this is intentionally "deceptively cute," in which case, consider me deceived.

Sparklite is a roguelike adventure that’s scheduled to release on Steam this autumn. It doesn’t sound like an especially relaxing game, what with needing to stop an evil mineral miner from “fuelling his powerful war machines” and destroying the world with pollution, and yet I find this tree shared by Red Blue Games’ pixel artist endlessly soothing.

The rest of the game's pixel plants are great too (you can see some of them up there in the header image). All the more reason to stop everything being destroyed at the hands of The Baron.

For more snippets of in development games, you can take a peek into the Twitter tag yourself.