Paw & Pixel is a small personal game built as a tribute to Tupe, an orange tabby stray cat raised at home who stayed after his two siblings grew up and left. He was calm and affectionate, always nuzzling close, and would only come running when called in a falsetto voice. He passed away at four years old. The player walks a small pixel-art forest built with Phaser 3, with a cat companion sprite based on him as a quiet way of keeping his memory close.
A scrollable look at the finished site, exactly as a visitor would browse it.
Desktop
Mobile
The tools and technologies that came together to bring this project to life.
Each project draws on a mix of disciplines, here's how they came together on this one.
A closer look at what the finished product offers, the obstacles along the way, and what came out of it.
Filling a Forest Without It Feeling Repetitive
A 1600x1600 world needed roughly 260 trees to feel like a real forest, but placing them all by hand would have taken forever and risked visible repetition, solved by hand-placing 82 trees in groves along the borders and interior, then filling the rest with a seeded procedural algorithm that scattered around 180 more while keeping a minimum distance between groves.
Keeping AI-Generated Assets Visually Consistent
Assets were generated through Seedance separately per type (trees, grass, characters), risking a mismatched style or palette between them, fixed by iterating on prompts and manually curating outputs to keep every asset consistent.
Preventing the Player From Slipping Between Trees
A single circle collision per tree still let the player squeeze through narrow diagonal gaps where trees stood close together, fixed by adding a second collision layer, thin segment walls between any two trunks within 34px of each other, closing every gap a single circle would miss.
How this project changed things for the business and its users after launch.
A memory kept alive
Images under 200KB
3-direction sprite set
Zero clip-through gaps
Before
Stray cats like Tupe rarely get any lasting record of the life they lived, once they're gone there's usually nothing left behind.
After
Tupe now has a small, permanent world to be remembered in, a personal reminder that even a stray cat's life and affection deserve to be honored.
Before
High-resolution images across the site, not just one section, risked slowing down every page.
After
Every image across the site is compressed to WebP and kept under 200KB, keeping pages fast without a visible drop in quality.
Before
The character only had a single static sprite regardless of which way it moved.
After
Added directional sprites (front, back, side) for both the player and the cat companion, giving movement a proper sense of life.
Before
A single circle collision per tree still let the player squeeze through narrow diagonal gaps where trees stood close together.
After
Added connecting segment walls between nearby trunks, closing every gap a single circle could miss, so movement now feels solid and grounded.
