Crazy Cat Lady

An old lady in a cardigan and her pack of cats are loose in an open city of dog people. There are no tracks and no levels: it is one map, all of it there from the start, and she can walk anywhere she can get to. In the way are the dog walkers and the dog park activists, the allergic neighbours, the council inspectors, the animal control officers, the joggers who were not looking, and the dogs. She mostly doesn't lift a finger. The cats do the fighting.

Somewhere in all of it are 42 golden keys, and ten strays sitting about waiting to be taken in.

A reskin of Metrlol, and made of the games before it:

• the engine is Metrlol's, which is Petroll's: the renderer, the physics, the tiled map builder, traffic, hazards, minimap and HUD. The map is Metrlol's, a city of nine parts, 256 tiles each way, re-signed and renamed for cats; like Metrlol's it is tested to be rollable (here, walkable) from end to end;
• the lady is Nonna (characters/nonna.metrlol) from the madness-engine library, walking about on the ball the physics rolls for her;
• the cats are Catroller's: the six coats of characters/cat (Blaze, Nyx, Ghost, Jinx, Vex and Brutus), sculpted at the size of the house they came from and scaled here to about a fifth of a tile at the back, to the lady's three-quarters;
• the music is Catroller's: a sneaky little jazz trio played live in Web Audio, the drums doubling up when the cats are at somebody;
• the golden keys are the library's key.

It is not about anyone in particular, and it is fair to all dogs and cats.

Run

git clone https://github.com/h1ddenpr0cess20/crazy-cat-lady
cd crazy-cat-lady
npm install
npm run dev               # → http://localhost:5173

A static page: no server, no keys. npm run build puts it in dist/, which runs from any folder. WebGPU where the browser has it, WebGL 2 where it doesn't (?renderer=webgl pins it). Node 22.12 or later.

Play

←↑↓→ or WASD	Walk. Up always walks up the screen, however the view is turned.
Hold the mouse or a finger	Walk toward the pointer. The further it is from her, the harder she goes.
Click (or tap), or F	Swing the wooden spoon. It comes round the whole of her, hits everybody within reach and shoves them back. Three hit points a swing, and her arm needs 0.7 s between swings; the cats do the rest. A quick click doesn't walk anywhere: holding the mouse down does. The SWING button on a touch screen; Y or the right bumper on a gamepad.
Space, right-click, or K	Jump: about a tile and a bit, enough for a kerb, a step or a low wall. The JUMP button on a touch screen; B on a gamepad.
Shift	Hurry: hold it for a faster walk, until the meter runs dry (it refills when you let go). The HURRY button on a touch screen. The cats keep up.
Q E, or drag with the right mouse button	Turn the view. Dragging up and down tilts it. (A quick right click, without dragging, is a jump.)
Mouse wheel, or + −	Zoom.
Two fingers	Pinch to zoom, twist to turn, drag up or down to tilt.
C	Put the view back.
Gamepad	Left stick or d-pad walks; right stick turns and tilts; shoulder buttons zoom; A, X or the right trigger hurries; Start pauses.
P / Esc	A tea break (pause).
M	Sound on or off.

The cats do the fighting

Six cats start with her. They trot after her in a loose ring (and hop up kerbs when they get stuck on them), and when somebody comes near she doesn't have to do anything: the nearest foe each cat can see is the one it runs at, and it claws, over and over, until the foe is shooed (thrown clear, with a yelp).

Claws	A claw takes one off a foe's hit points (Brutus, the tom, takes two, one every half second). A foe has twice its toughness in hit points; a boss has a good deal more. A foe that is clawed stops where it is for a moment.
SHOOED!	The foe is gone, worth purrs.
SWARMED!	Four or more cats had a go at it in the last moment. Worth double.
Combo	Shoos one after another build a combo (×5 at most) that multiplies each one.
Mischief	With nobody to fight, a cat will go and knock over whatever small thing is lying about: a cone, a bin, a bench. Worth a little each, and they come back with a new run. The lady walking into them doesn't.

• Strays are cats sitting about in ten places round the city (the pink dots on the map). Walk up to one and it joins the pack, up to 16 cats. Which strays you have taken in is kept between visits.
• Golden keys are the 42 things to find, with a shaft of light going up from each. The map shows the ones in the parts of town you've been to.
• Hearts are the little hearts lying about in lines. They are love, and worth nothing.

Staying in one piece

She starts with 100 patience. Hard landings, cars, yarn reels rolling after her, the sprinklers coming up out of the floor and the people who get to her take it away (half as much as they would: she is a tough old bird). At nothing she is flustered, and she is back at the last rest stop she came to, with a sit down and a cup of tea. A can press coming down on her flusters her outright. The milk lake and the sea swallow her, and she's put back on the last firm ground. The cats come with her.

What you've found, the strays you've taken in, the last rest stop and the time so far are kept in the browser (crazy-cat-lady.v1), and the game plays the same with storage blocked.

The people

Nobody is placed in the crowd. The people are made as she walks: a few at a time, out of her sight, on open ground round her, picked from the table of the district she is in (src/spawns.js) and as many as that district's density (the Kennel District and the Pound are crowded, the far side is not), and unmade when she has left them well behind. It is the same every time. Only the three bosses and the troll under the bridge are placed, where they stand.

Seventy-three kinds of people, sculpted in code and baked in background workers while the page loads. Who they are, and what they shout, is in src/foes.js; the models are Metrlol's cast in new names: the dog walker is the cultist, the animal control officer the beat cop, the jogger the straight-edge kid, and the colossal sheepdog the yeti.

The city

Nine parts of town, three across and three down, the busy road down the east side, and the far side of it. The ground plan is Metrlol's; the names and signs are new:

Whisker Heights, north-west	Home. Cat houses, a drained pool that is now the catnip patch, the cat-house village, the hedge maze, the tuna co-op with its roof, and the cat playground.
The Kennel District, north	The Kennel Club, the slippery slope, the dinner clock, the plaza where the dog park protest has been for a year.
Purrdue University, north-east	The campus, the lever problem (knock it off the table?), and the Great Cat Tree: a ramp three times round it to the top.
The Pound, west	Behind a fence: the kibble tank with a lift up its side, sprinkler alley, the bunker. The Chief Warden lives here.
Meowtown, the middle	Downtown. Cat videos on every screen, Meme Square, the ball pit, the catwalk (a walkway in the air), the catnip farm.
Zoomie Valley, east	The zoomie cycle in hills: the peak of the zoomies, the trough of naps, the slope of stretching, the plateau of loafing. The cat café, and the Pet Food Baron's infinity pool.
Sardine Bay, south-west	The canning hall (presses coming down on the lane), the litter box (real sand), the fish market, the beach, the pier and the sea.
The Kibble Works, south-east	The kibble halls, the silos, the milk pipe, the milk lake, the yarn yard where the reels come after you, the scratching ramp.
The Busy Road	Four lanes of trucks and cars. Nobody brakes. Nobody looks. On the far side, the farm.

How it's made

madness-engine	The engine the game runs on, and the library of its people, props, streets, vehicles, cats and band.
src/lady.js	The lady, drawn walking on her ball: faces where she's going, walks faster the faster she goes, flinches, goes down when flustered.
src/pack.js	The cats: following, hunting, clawing, mischief, growing.
src/claws.js	What a claw does and what a shoo is worth.
src/crowd.js, src/spawns.js	The people: how they walk and come at the lady, and who is made where.
src/foes.js, src/quips.js	Who they are and what they shout; what the lady says.
src/map.js, src/town.js	The map: tiles, road paint, props, solids, traffic, hazards, pickups, strays, signs; and the city, part by part.
src/run.js	The world as it runs, with nothing drawn: the rules for patience, claws, pickups. The game draws it; the tests drive it.
src/audio.js	Catroller's trio, and every sound effect, synthesised.

Some names in the code are Metrlol's still: the golden keys are gpus and gpus, the rest stops are whetstones and stones, the purrs are cred.

Script
npm run dev	Vite dev server (and /preview.html: the lady and the cats at size; ?foes=pauser,eurocrat, ?foes=all)
npm run build	Bundles to dist/
npm test	node:test: physics, the map builder, the city, the traffic, the hazards, the crowd and the spawner, the cats and their claws, the strays, and an autopilot that has to find all 42 golden keys in one go without being flustered
npm run lint	ESLint

In the browser console, crazyCatLady.debug.teleport(x, z) puts her anywhere on the map.