Could the next big thing in videogames be a stray ginger tabby, just trying to find her way home?
Sydney-based indie games studio Spoonful of Wonder is pitching its first title Copycat at Australia's first video games market event, Play Now Melbourne.
Spoonful of Wonder is among 39 Australian developer teams at the event, with representatives from global IT companies Sony PlayStation, Xbox, Meta and Apple visiting the city in the hunt for the next big title.
Pitching Copycat has been nerve-wracking, says the studio's Samantha Cable, who with partner Kostia Liakhov has been talking potential investors through the game, and inviting them to play parts of it on a handheld device.
Copycat tells the heartwarming tale of Dawn, a sceptical shelter cat who would rather be in the wild - until she is forced out of her adopted home and finds herself on the streets.
So, will the Play Now pitching event help the game itself find a home?
Cable and Liakhov are coy, revealing a few companies have shown some interest, although the game is still in the testing stages.
In late September the couple sent a demo version to 130 people to check the game worked as it should. There's only so many times a two-person studio can play through their own game looking for bugs.
They plan to release Copycat in early 2024, into a market of gamers looking to Australian independent studios for unusual and creative new titles.
Among recent popular games are three from Melbourne studios: Kinder World, a self-care game by Lumi Interactive, Frog Detective by Worm Club, and Wayward Strand by Ghost Pattern, which explores a hospital set in an airship.
There's also the Massive Monster hit game Cult of the Lamb, which in 2022 became one of the highest-grossing indie games of all time, selling more than one million copies in its first week on the market.
One potential investor visiting Play Now, Vicky Wei from Akupara Games in Los Angeles, says the games she has seen so far have a strong story to tell, thanks in part to Victoria's robust community of developers.
"It's great, really clear that the developers care about one another and support each other," Wei says.
Victoria is emerging as a regional gaming hub with 170 development studios and more than half of Australia's gaming workforce.
Two-thirds of Australians play video games, and in 2020/21 local game development studios made $226 million, with 82 per cent of that money from overseas markets, according to figures from the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association.
The local industry got its start mainly because US gaming companies wanted to take advantage of the time difference to run development 24/7 until the global financial crisis forced the closure of local operations.
Taxpayer funding has also been a boost. Vicscreen funded its first game, a CD-ROM about adolescent health, in 1993.
Things have come a long way since then, with Play Now aimed at bringing the international market to the doorstep of Melbourne developers.
Although the event is funded by the Victorian government, it's important to include gaming studios from all over the country, VicScreen chief executive Caroline Pitcher says.
"The aspiration is to become a global leader and to do that, collaboration and collegiality is really important to us."
For Cable and Liakhov, Copycat began as a hobby in 2021 and has become their all-consuming passion, with Cable working on the story, and Liakhov creating the artwork.
They both quit their jobs in advertising at the start of 2023 when the project won production funding from Screen Australia in the hope that Copycat will find a market with gamers and cat lovers too.
But how did they know how to program a videogame in the first place?
"We understand the basics, and luckily these days, you can learn anything from YouTube," Liakhov says.
Play Now Melbourne is part of Melbourne International Games Week.
