The story
A nine-year-old designed this. We just built it.
KittyKlash started as a conversation between a boy and his grandfather about the game he wished existed. It is now a real game, on the internet, that anybody can play — and it is still his design.
“It's good just it's kinda laggy and I counted some glitches that made me like when I died. It wouldn't turn me back to lobby and I couldn't stop climbing a tree.”
— the designer, filing his first playtest reportHow it happened
From a conversation to a live game
A boy describes his dream game
Cats with silly powers. A castle you hang out in. Dogs instead of a shrinking storm. Mice you chase to heal. A cat so ugly that looking at it hurts. All of it his.
His grandfather writes it all down
Every cat, every weapon, every rule — turned into an actual specification rather than a nice story about a grandchild.
It gets built properly
Not a mock-up. A real multiplayer game with an authoritative server, accounts, an economy and around 470 automated tests. Three.js in the browser, so it runs on the tablet he already owns.
He plays it and files a bug report
“It's good just it's kinda laggy and I counted some glitches that made me like when I died. It wouldn't turn me back to lobby and I couldn't stop climbing a tree.” Every one of those was real, and every one got fixed.
It keeps getting better
Procedural bark and fur. Three species of tree. A dog rebuilt from bear proportions into dog ones. A mouse with an actual face. The bar is a game he chooses over the other games on the tablet.
Why it looks like this
Aiming at Saturday morning
The instruction was: keep improving it until you would mistake it for a Saturday morning cartoon. Flat-shaded colour, banded lighting, a hard dark outline round every character — the same three tricks that make animation read as drawn rather than rendered.
The palette is deliberately warm and saturated, because the screen this is played on is a tablet held outdoors as often as not, and tasteful muted colours disappear in daylight.
Who makes it
A Raging Rhino Group product
KittyKlash is built and run by Raging Rhino Group, alongside a portfolio of software for people who work for a living — field service, hiring, reviews, remote access. This is the only one of them designed by a child, and it is the one we are asked about most.
Go and play his game
It is free, it is in your browser, and it takes about a minute to get into a match.