SIPBLOG: Team Alley Cats – 7/7/26
Team Alley Cats
By Dan Lu (Producer)
“Big Cookie”
Do you hear meowing? Screeching? Sounds of equal joy and despair? If you do, don’t worry about it—that’s just a regular production day for the Alley Cats team, who are working on a puzzle platformer called Licky Thief.
Licky Thief is about a leopard gecko, named Gecky, who breaks into this rich hawk’s mansion to steal back ancestral gecko artifacts. It’s made up of several short levels where you play as Gecky, using your tongue as a grappling hook to bypass several heist-style security measures (spotlights, lasers, cameras, and more).
Gecky is a character we’ve all put our hearts into, and I’m not just saying that as the lead writer. I can see this from the way one of our programmers gushed after implementing a (completely useless yet precious) mechanic that allows Gecky to make a talking motion. The artists are also having lots of fun adding to the worldbuilding, from pouring hours into perfecting a comic cutscene to coming up with fun level props for environmental storytelling.
As the team’s producer, I have had the pleasure of watching our team dynamic evolve from nervously cordial to tight-knit and deeply collaborative. There are fake rivalries that lead to funny banter; a programmer and an artist switched places for half a day, resulting in MS Paint art assets that will live forever in our hearts (though not in our game).
We have a daily icebreaker ritual where we try to ask a new hypothetical question every day, and we try to spend at least one of our three daily breaks playing a game together like Gartic Phone or OpenGuessr. We have so many inside jokes that mundane words like “big” or “small” might send any one of us down a spiral of despair. To many outsiders, we may seem like we have all lost our minds. But that is the beauty of production.
As we enter the final stretch of development, stress levels are definitely mounting. But I feel relieved and very grateful for my team’s cohesion and determination to uplift each other and reach our goals. Unfortunately, one of our team members dropped the (red) ball when he was too scared to order the Big Cookie. It’s okay if you don’t know what that means. You probably don’t want to anyway.
