FatCatSumoLite

Fat Cat Sumo is a 1v1 sumo brawler where two very fat cats try to shove each other out of the ring. There are no health bars, only stamina.

Each round starts with both cats charging from behind the white line. They collide in a comic-book smoke cloud and lock into a grapple. From there it’s a push war:

• W (mash) — push forward. Every tap drains a bit of stamina and moves the deadlock toward your opponent’s edge.
• Space (block) — brace up. You regenerate stamina, but you slide backwards while doing it, because your opponent is unrelenting, so turtling forever is a guaranteed loss.
• Left click (Frenzy) — only available when your stamina is empty. A wheel spins on screen and you have to click inside the target zone. Nail it and you get stamina back plus a burst of momentum; miss and you’re wide open.

You lose the moment your feet cross the ring line. Matches are short, loud and decided by timing rather than button speed alone.

Single player is an arcade climb up a mountain staircase — one CPU opponent per step, difficulty rising each time, and a boss fight against the evil version of the cat you picked. You get three continues.

Key Features

• Playable straight in the browser. No install, no account, no email — you click and you’re fighting.
• Hand-made cat roster, each with their own name plate and voice callout on the select screen.
• Stamina / block / frenzy triangle instead of health bars: every exchange is a resource decision, not a mash-off.
• Arcade ladder with an evil mirror-match boss, three continues, and a KO cinematic.
• Themed rings with ambient particles (sakura petals, neon specks, embers in the evil stages).
• Full audio pass: stereo panning, separate FX and Music sliders, randomised fight tracks, and a pile of cat noises recorded by hand.
• This is the Lite build — the full version is coming to Steam with the complete roster, all rings and the full music set.

What makes your game stand out

Most fighting games sell you fluid animation. Fat Cat Sumo does the opposite on purpose: the fight itself is two static, funny cat drawings locked together, and everything else — screen shake, chromatic aberration bursts, smoke clouds, particles, cat screams — does the work of making it feel violent. It reads like a comic panel that won’t sit still.

The result is a game that’s genuinely tense to play and genuinely silly to watch. No lore, no tutorial, no health bars. Two fat cats, one ring, and a lot of screaming.

AI Tools Used

GPT (image and concept art generation), Pika (animating the stills into motion for sprite extraction), Claude Fable (code), Animoca Minds (creative and technical direction).

How AI was integrated into the development process

AI touched almost every layer, but in clearly separated roles.

Direction — Animoca Minds acted as art and technical director: deciding how the game should be executed, what to build, in what order, and how the pieces fit together. It set the direction; the other tools carried it out.

Art — GPT generated the cats, the rings, the UI panels, the result screens and the progression map. I then fed those stills into Pika to animate them, and pulled the frames back out as sprite sheets, which is how the charge and grapple poses were made.

Code — Claude Fable wrote the game itself: canvas rendering, the stamina/block/frenzy loop, the CPU opponent, the Web Audio mixer with panning and volume sliders, and the whole screen flow. I worked with it conversationally — arguing about mechanics before a single line got written, then iterating build by build.

Human — the concept, design decisions, all the voice acting , and every judgement call about what actually felt good to play.