9 Lives
An open-world action game where you play a cat in Nine Lives County: a downtown, an old town, suburbs, a harbour, an airport and a big stretch of countryside. Steal cars, dodge the police, play the story missions, fly planes and blow things up. All on a game engine written from scratch in C.
Game in development. 9 Lives is not released yet and there is no public download. What you see here is the game as it runs today, and it changes every week.
25missions and jobs, with cutscenes and voices
1,600+automated in-game checks
3city bus routes, a bullet train, and Concorde
30+ km²of countryside beyond the city
What you can do as a cat
A GTA-style sandbox with a cat's point of view. Run the rooftops, take a car, and see how many of your nine lives you can keep.
- On foot
- Run, jump, fly, meow, and hunt rabbits and birds. Pigeons, ducks and other animals talk back with 85 voiced lines.
- Wheels
- Steal and drive cars, vans, buses and trucks, with a full interior in every car. Crashes dent the body and bend the suspension, and airbags go off in a hard head-on hit. Three radio stations: Purr FM, Hiss 101 and Nine Lives Talk.
- Wanted level
- One to five stars that rise one at a time. Police are sent from two precincts along real roads: patrol cars, roadblocks and a helicopter, and tanks at five stars. Press V beside a stopped police car to take it and drive it.
- Story
- An 8-mission Nine Lives arc and a 10-mission chain for Big Tom's Harbour, plus seven hustle jobs that ring your phone: street race, chop shop, fire-truck blaze, farm rescue, bus job, stealth theft and a bank heist. Cutscenes, timers, voices and enemies that shoot back.
- Air, rail and sea
- Fly planes, including Concorde with afterburners, and helicopters from a police chopper to a Chinook. Drive one of four army tanks, ride the three city bus routes and the bullet train, and sail five boats, including a Dornier flying boat.
- Things that go bang
- Guns, grenades, C4 that brings whole buildings and bridge spans down with fire and smoke, and a chainsaw for felling trees.
- Weather and time
- A 10-minute day and night, rain storms with lightning and thunder, and fireworks after dark.
- Crime
- Five houses to burgle, three gangs fighting over 12 turf zones, and rough cats who pull knives and guns if pushed.
Your cat is not just a thief
Set up a camp that stays, build anything with blocks, grow crops, breed animals and buy businesses. It all saves between sessions.
Build like Minecraft
A mini block world
- Press K on open ground to set up a camp. It stays, shows on the map and takes the cat in when it is knocked out. Up to eight camps
- A 9-slot hotbar and a pop-up inventory. Mine with a pickaxe, place blocks on any face, drag to lay a row, a floor or four walls at once
- Stone, cobblestone, sandstone and oak planks, as cubes, slabs, stairs, slopes, panels, pillars, fences, walls, glass, doors, trapdoors, ladders and torches
- Turn pieces 90 degrees, flip them, and stairs join up at corners by themselves
- Crafting at the bench or the fire, plus 36 pieces of furniture: sit on sofas, sleep in beds, store things in chests
- Creative mode: every block free and endless, anywhere in the world
Farm
Crops and animals
- Till the ground with a hoe, plant seeds and water them. Wheat, carrots, catnip and pumpkins grow in about two game days, half that when watered
- Fish in ponds, and fill ponds yourself with a bucket
- Catch wild animals with a net, build a pen and breed them: hens, ducks, rabbits and deer
- Animals eat, drink, sleep and court in the pen. Add troughs, a coop and hay
- Eggs, duck eggs, wool and milk to collect
- Clover Farm starts you off with a barn, a gated pen and four animals
Run a business
Eight businesses to buy and manage
Buy the Tuna Melt Diner, Salty Paws Tavern, Velvet Lounge, Whisker Wash, The Chop Shop, Fresh Fish & Co, Claw & Order Guns or Paw Print Laundry from their FOR SALE signs. Then run it from a management screen on your phone.
- Buy stock and upgrades, and watch hourly takings tick in on the game clock
- Run ads with flyers, the radio or a billboard to bring in customers
- Build your reputation, or cook the books and launder cash, and risk an audit or a tax raid
- Rival gangs may demand protection money, and a seized business goes back on the market
- Sell the business when you want out
Plenty to do between missions
Open the side-job menu and pick something. Every job pays, and your stats and completion are on the pause screen.
- Side jobs
- Taxi fares with tips, paramedic runs to the vet clinic, vigilante chases in a police car, and courier runs by boat and by plane.
- Races and stunts
- Four street races against three rival cars, 20 stunt ramps with slow-motion jumps, and 50 golden fish bones to find.
- Emergency services
- Ambulances come from the vet clinic to fetch run-over cats. Pay 'n' Spray in Big Tom's garage repaints your car and clears your stars for cash.
- Properties
- Buy places that pay daily income, including a villa that is a safehouse and saves the game.
- Places to walk into
- Shops such as a bakery, fishmonger and pharmacy, six churches, a casino, a karting hall, a skate park, a farmhouse, and a tower with a glass lift to a 118 m sky deck.
- Gun shop and garage
- The Whisker Armoury sits on the start street, and Big Tom's garage is a real workshop with a lift.
- Towns and landmarks
- Dustpaw town at the end of the Long Mile, a 45 m Ferris wheel you can ride, and bridge spans that drop to C4 and are rebuilt by a repair crew over a game day.
- Animals and nature
- Great white sharks that bite, dogs at the Bark Park that play fetch and run an agility course, cows, horses, pigs, foxes and deer herds on the farm, and real 3D trees and crop rows.
- Talking and phones
- Dozens of voiced lines, a talk-to-Big-Tom menu, passers-by who react to crashes, and phone calls you can answer, reject or return.
- Options
- Three save slots plus autosave, Easy, Normal and Hard difficulty, photo mode, fullscreen, graphics quality and draw distance, and menus that fit ultrawide screens.
A whole county to get lost in
40 + 44named characters plus crowd cats in the streets
3 / 12rival gangs and the turf zones they fight over
5boats, 4 tanks, 2 trains, plus planes and helicopters
100+wild animals: rabbits, ducks, fish, birds, deer
Our own engine, not Unity or Unreal
Every system in the game, from rendering to traffic to the wanted level, is code we wrote.
- Engine
- A custom game engine in C, about 530 source files, drawing with OpenGL 3.3 on Windows.
- Graphics
- Film-style lighting with sunsets and haze, soft shading, glow, reflections on cars and water, and smooth edges. Textures are compressed from 4.9 GB down to 1.2 GB.
- Performance
- Profiled and tuned in-house: compact vertex buffers, spatial grids and shadow culling cut CPU work by more than half.
- Build
- Compiled with Zig's C compiler into a single Windows program.
- Asset pipeline
- Models go through Python and Blender into our own mesh format and a packed world file.
- Testing
- More than 1,600 automated in-game checks run against the world, vehicles and missions.
- Where it started
- An early Android prototype in C++ and OpenGL ES 3, with touch controls, a cat, two cars and some dogs.
Watch it move
The official trailer, captured in-engine, with music, voice-over and game sound.