Interview with Star Vault, Creators of Kitten’d

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself as well as your role at Star Vault?

My name is Sebastian Persson and I am the leader programmer at Star Vault.

I have worked here since forever and was part of the original crew so I have been with the company from the very start.

On a small company like ours everyone does a little bit of everything so I do not only code or lead coders I also help with art, PR, websites, make trailers etc.

How was Star Vault formed? Can you provide a brief history.

Star Vault was formed in 2005 by our CEO Henrik Nyström. He wanted to make a modern version of an MMORPG called Ultima Online.

We started off in a pretty small office. In the beginning there were like 7 of us. Making a MMORPG with such a small team was a insanely overwhelming task but we did it and in 2010 Mortal Online was released.

Being a MMORPG we constantly update Mortal Online and have done so for the last 9 years, being a very niche game we have a very strong dedicated community that plays it to this day.

In 2018 we wanted to branch out and do something different in a more modern engine so we hired a small amount of people to start working on different prototypes and ended up with Kitten’d that was first released on PC a year later.

How many people work at Star Vault. What are there roles and responsibilities?

We are 16 people at the moment split on 3 projects. We have the basic setup with 3 leads for programming, art, tech art.

Since we are running an MMORPG we also have world builders and Game Masters on the payroll that help run the daily stuff in Mortal Online.

But as I said before being such a small studio means that everyone needs to do a little bit of everything.

For the viewers that haven’t played Kitten’d can you explain to them what this game is about.

Kitten’d is a game where you take care of lots and lots of kittens for a 3-4 minutes and then get scored on your performance.

It’s a so called “spinning plate game” where you are tasked with doing a lots of stuff for a short time and need to make quick and cleaver decisions on what to do in what order.

Should I pet the angry cats or clean the litter-box? Is is more important to fill up the food bowl or stop the kittens from destroying the nuclear plant?

To help you along the way after each level you get coins that you can use to upgrade your tools and make some tasks easier for the next level.

Who thought up the concept of Kitten’d and why turn it into a game?

The idea was actually mine. We pitched a whole bunch of ideas during the prototype phase in 2018. We knew we wanted to do VR in UE4 but what exactly we did now know.

Then I remembered a dream I use to have. In the dream I found a hole in my apartment and out of the hole came a kitten. Obviously I was thrilled but then another one came out and another.

But the end of the dream I was surrounded by cute kittens but also panicking because how the heck was I supposed to take care of all these.

That turned into the game you have today.

What does the ‘d stand for in Kitten’d?

It’s a play of the old show “Punk’d”. Also we found some … lose evidence that the word Kitten’d was used as slang for when someone just gives you a box of kittens that you now must take care of.

You just got Kitten’d!

Were real kittens used when making this game? The kittens look very realistic.

Nope actually! We made all the kittens in like 4 months really quickly we didn’t have whole lot of time to build the game but decided to scrap them ALL and rebuild them again pushing the internal release date.

This was a great decision because the current kittens look amazing and the art folks over here did an amazing job.

Were there any lessons learned from your previous game Mortal Online that you applied to Kitten’d?

Mortal Online is a super deep and complex game. It’s has systems upon systems that all interact with each other.

At times there are so many systems that some of the “fun” gets lost. In Kitten’d we approached all of the game design by first thinking about “how is this fun?”.

Are there any challenges or difficulties when making games for the PlayStation VR , Steam, Oculus?

There are lots of challenges! Building a VR game is very different from building a none-VR game.

First of all these types of games are so new that we haven’t figured everything out yet. For example in almost all none-VR games you move forward by pressing a stick up or pressing “W”.

In VR games you teleport, smooth move, drag yourself you name it people are trying all kinds of stuff out. There’s no real standards yet, this makes it very interesting to build VR games but also means you have to test stuff out a lot more.

For the PSVR performance was an issue. I thought the VR-hardware would be a problem but the PSVR works insanely well for it’s price.

The hardware in the PlayStation however is getting old so we had to do a lot of optimization but we got there in the end.

What does the future hold for Star Vault? Any new projects in the works?

We are currently still updating Kitten’d and Mortal Online but a large part of the studio is working on a sequel to Mortal Online. More info on that very soon.

Kitten’d is currently digital only is there any talks with other companies like Limited Run Games, Super Rare games to bring a physical version to the Playstation VR?

Man that would be just awesome! We haven’t talked about it internally but I would love to do that.

Do you have any advice for other game developers who are also hoping to create a quality game like Kitten’d.

Start small and use an engine. Unless you want do create something completely bonkers modern engines will save you an insane amount of time.

Before we end this interview is there anything else you’d like to share?

This community the whole VR community, it’s awesome. Everyone has been crazy friendly to us, we have gotten so much great feedback from players.

Good feedback and positive reactions to your game really fuels game developers and the VR community has kept our tanks full.