Kitten

Kittens are the main characters in Kitten Space Agency. They will serve as crew for spacecraft and perform activities in space and on the surfaces of celestial bodies.

EVA control

Kittens can be directly controlled while on EVA on planetary surfaces and in space. While on EVA the spacesuit comes with an MMU attached that allows for six degrees of motion in space and flight on low-gravity bodies.

Characters

The first Kitten which was added to the game is named Hunter.

History

Before Kitten Space Agency was announced to the public, kittens were one of the character options explored by the dev team, alongside kiwis, keas, and other creatures. The studio also explored different head-body proportions for cats, different types of helmets (including helmets with and without ears), and other style choices. Once the KSA Discord was opened to the public, the first 2D concept art of kittens was shown. While the choice of main creature wasn't set in stone at the time, kittens were the frontrunners at this point for practical reasons (ease of asset development) and game design reasons (their cuteness discouraging players from treating them as disposable). Revised concept art was shown with the body proportions tweaked, with the acknowledgement that the large head and "impossibly small body" would be "impractical in the real world" but would make it easier to develop animations and character variation.

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  Kitten concept art
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  Cover art concepts featuring kittens
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  Concept art featuring kittens

Later, a video was shown of a 3D kitten model in Unreal Engine, to test proportions and body animations before adding fur, materials, and facial animations.

A revised kitten model was shown in Brutal, with fur and facial animations but no lighting or shadows.

Design

The kitten proportions were set so that a kitten's head is the same height as its body, the same 50:50 ratio as the Kerbals in Kerbal Space Program. Dean elaborated on the reasons:

I definetly understand that there will be many people who'd want us to head away from the proportions we have (which are very close to the kerbal ones). However this is set in stone, for production, technical, cost, and risk reasons. It's a lot easier for our pipeline to have these "cartoonish" proportions. 50/50 [head/body] proportions make it much, much more forgiving for animations. Animations become 'representative" of an action. the animations can be almost garbage, and you won't really notice. even technically, keyframe wise, we could skip keyframes and you won't even notice

After the revised kitten model was shown, Dean reiterated that the head-body proportions would not be changing:

In terms of proportions. We had meetings, discussions, and analysis. We made a decision. And then move forward with that. Daishi and others have already been factoring the proportion decisions into their work. This shows why it is important to make decisions like this early, and stick with them.

I’m not perfect; but I do think I’m consistent and I stick with things. Some game dev bosses might be kinder, but also some tend to change their mind a lot on this kind of stuff. But that gets exhausting

Animation and pipeline issues nearly bankrupted the studio. We are sensitive to that and nobody wants to go through it again.

Trivia

Kittens were not the first choice for KSA's characters, but the developers settled on them for their ease of implementation. When kea (a species of parrot native to New Zealand) were suggested on Reddit, Dean said the following:

This is my moment!

I’m a mountaineer and I absolutely love Kea. They’re my spirit animal. They are crazy smart, fierce warriors, cheeky. They teach each other through play!

I really wanted to do Kea for KSA. I really really wanted to. But they have so much going against them; especially from a technical perspective.

They would not be a traditional bipedal

This means when we “rig” the model, and then begin animating it, we can’t rely on the massive array of support stuff for animating bipedals. It’s so much easier to animate classic bipedal characters; the entire industry has just masses of bipedal content and every animator has trained to death doing bipedal animations.

They don’t have arms

This means that we have to rethink their movement. It’s an extension of above, but delving into design. The content and design implications are huge. Kea use their mouths for everything and it’s awesome! But that turned every animation and interaction into a very expensive and complex piece of animation to make.

We made kea for ICARUS and they are so cool - but it’s all very bespoke work. And that’s when the kea are in their traditional habitat, outside, not cooped up in a space ship in a suit.

Feathers are a problem

This is a content nightmare. Our “g-fur” hack for kittens gets us by for kittens. We can get quite far with it for a kea, but up close for feathers it just won’t hold up at all. Then we have to place “cards” and this is a nightmare. You can almost guarantee the artist who has to do that will leave after. Especially when rigging!

Individuality content is nearly impossible

This means it is really difficult for us to make them different. The kittens can easily have a huge head. We can swap out the textures easily to make them look like different breeds. There is so much natural variation in cats that we are spoiled for choice in how we make lots of different kittens. For kea there is none of this, so we are starting from scratch.

Conclusion

Imagine in your head now how difficult you think this would be compared to kittens. You are wrong, it is much much harder. It is a huge amount of work, and a lot of it is novel work - that is it’s work that hasn’t been done before. We are starting from scratch meaning we don’t know how to solve it.

Kittens won because they are extremely low risk, they use known solutions and techniques, and they’re insanely easy content wise to produce.

I really wish it could have been Kea Space Agency!