Two years ago, over a quiet Christmas break, Oliver Hindle and Ruby-Mae Roberts decided to make a video game together. The twentysomething couple were both keen gamers; Oliver even worked at a development studio, Bossa, the company behind offbeat hits such as Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, making their YouTube videos and trailers. It seemed like a fun idea – it’s just that Oliver had never coded a game before and Ruby had never written anything.
The result is Purrfect Date, a game in which you … well, date cats. It was released on PC in December and iPhone earlier this month, where it was recently made App of the Day and is attracting rave reviews from players. Given the popularity of cats on the internet and throughout social media, its success might not seem that surprising. But for Oliver and Ruby, its creation was deeply personal. As passion projects often do, Purrfect Date became about life and relationships and helping each other. It’s not a game about cats: it’s a game about love.
“We’d often ask, what would be the perfect game for our friends and family?” says Oliver. “Then we thought: but what about us?” Ruby chimes in: “We just started listing things. It would have to have cats in it, and our favourite TV show is Lost so we could set it on an island ... We didn’t expect it would be played. We just made it for each other.”
In Purrfect Date, you take on the role of a researcher arriving on Cat Island to assist a mysterious scientist named Professor Pawpur. Your job is to track and register the feline inhabitants, using a handy device named the Cat-A-Log (“For the last two years, my life has basically been cat puns,” says Ruby). On the first night, however, a cat-scratch infects you with a disease that will slowly transform you into a cat unless you discover the antidote. You can now converse with the friendlier felines of the isle, but with those foreign hormones racing through your bloodstream, you also find that you can date them.
Purrfect Date is sweet, funny and engaging. The romance aspect is innocent and friendly rather than physical, the six dateable cats quickly becoming fluffy symbols for lots of romantic traits and tropes. It’s a playful expression of something that’s been happening in game development since free tools and digital stores started democratising the medium several years ago: creators subverting video game conventions to explore personal, emotional and moral themes, using their own experiences as inspiration.
For Ruby and Oliver, it’s also subtly autobiographical. “This game is basically our relationship,” says Ruby. “There’s so much of our personalities in there – lots of jokes and loving insults. The sphynx cat is quite helpless in her vanity. She is very much me on a bad day … The game is an expression of our love for each other.”
But Purrfect Date’s development wasn’t easy. The narrative is deceptively complex: the game has to track exactly who has spoken to which cat and about what, forming a matrix of possibilities, and the script is over 120,000 words long. In the midst of wrestling with this, a year into development, Ruby found herself unexpectedly hospitalised when she woke up one night with pains in her chest and back.
“I was having trouble breathing, I was scared I was having some sort of heart attack,” she says. The couple rushed to A&E where a doctor told her it was probably heartburn. “It was quite anticlimatic. I felt a bit of a wimp. But then the same doctor came back with some test results and he had a completely different look on his face ...”
Ruby had an inflamed liver; her gall bladder had to be removed. The scenario was crushingly familiar: Ruby was born with a kidney disease that has required two kidney transplants; her father donated one when she was six and her mother the other when she was 19.
Her mum was about to come to the rescue again. After the operation, Ruby was bedridden for weeks, too fragile and exhausted to think about the game. But she and Oliver were committed to a release date. The schedule was falling apart. “I was in bed and useless,” says Ruby. “I was crying to Mum, ‘I don’t know what to do’ – and she said, ‘I can help.’”
Ruby’s mum is actor Charon Bourke, who starred in dozens of TV series and theatre productions in the 1980s and 90s before quitting to care for her daughter. Recently, she’s taken up playwriting, and took a keen interest in Purrfect Date, reading the scenes as Ruby wrote them. And so, for the two months Ruby was out of action, her mum took over the writing.
“She loved reading the game, and she could definitely see me in each of the cats,” says Ruby. “She’s a huge World of Warcraft fan, but for this I made her read visual novels to understand the inspiration. She’s really interested in new stuff – she wants to know what the kids are up to. She was able to copy my style really closely.”
Creative collaborations often result in tension between the people involved – but Oliver and Ruby found that Purrfect Date brought them closer. “We had the privilege of really getting to know and understand each other on a whole new level,” says Ruby. “It’s been invaluable to our relationship.”
Another relationship provided further inspiration: when Ruby was a child, she had a pet named Pushka. “She was a strange cat,” says Ruby. “She was so patient and tolerant of me, a very needy, clingy kid. She would allow me to bandage her up to play doctors; no other cat I’ve met since would stand for it. I think she understood I was unwell and it made her forgiving. She passed away a while ago and in April I’m going to get a tattoo of her in the style of the game.”
Purrfect Date is a reminder that everything we create, whether it’s a quick sketch, an epic novel or a cute game about going out with cats, says something about us. It holds the authors – their lives, their loves, their hopes – within it.
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