Why I'm Rebuilding My Shipped Game's Sequel in Unity Instead of GameMaker

Two weeks after shipping Call the Cat on Android, 

iOS, and Steam at the same time, I started the sequel. 

This time I picked an engine I'd never touched before — Unity — over GameMaker,

 which I already knew. 

Dropping a familiar tool for a new one isn't a decision I made lightly; 

relearning everything costs real time.

It started as a 2D game — "Catch & Dodge"

The very first mockup looked nothing like what I ended up with. 

A cat sits in the middle of the screen, 

items fly in from every side, and you bump into the ones that match the current rule while dodging the rest. 

The rule keeps changing ("eat this!" / "avoid this!"), 

combos build up, and a mistake costs a life.

This one still needs a manual step: switch to Compose view, 

click this line, use the toolbar's video-insert button, 

upload the file, then delete this bracketed line.

While building it, one question kept nagging me:

standing in one spot, eating and dodging things in sequence —

 is that actually fun in 2D? 

The rules were clear enough, 

but something about physically moving through space was missing.

Turning toward 3D

So I decided to go 3D. 

I also wanted this to become a series I could keep building on —

 reusing assets across entries — so using the same Call the Cat cat, 

I started thinking about a third genre for the IP: a space you could actually walk through.

As I sketched out what that space should feel like, two things became obvious. 

First, it had to be small. Second, if I wanted people to replay it, the challenge and the reward had to resolve in one short, 

simple round. And doing any of this in 3D was flatly not realistic in GameMaker —

 that became clear at the same time.

Why a small planet — The Little Prince

Small, and walkable — thinking about those two constraints together, 

I landed on The Little Prince: a tiny home planet you can circle on foot. 

I layered repeatable-fun mechanics and a conquer-collect-plant-a-flag goal on top of that image.

A planet appears, and a cat in a spacesuit walks across it —

 that's roughly when Galaxy took shape in my head.

The sequel already had a Steam Early Access listing

At the time, I was already building a second game, "LogMode" (로그냥), 

and it was live on Steam in Early Access. 

Dropping that entirely to start a brand-new game would mean rebuilding the store page and going through listing review again. 

I didn't want to do that.

So instead of throwing anything away, I tied all three into one arc:

• Game 1: cozy, neighborhood-set mini-games
• Game 2 (LogMode): combat inside that same dream-like space
• Game 3 (Galaxy): space

Home → dream fantasy → space. 

Once it lined up that way, I kept the main title and added Galaxy as a subtitle.

 If the home base (something like a bed) is where you fall asleep and enter the dream to fight in LogMode, then LogMode isn't being abandoned — 

it's being folded into Galaxy. 

That's when the real plan clicked: not killing the Early Access game, 

but moving the whole thing to Unity and integrating LogMode inside it.

The tradeoff I actually weighed

Once 3D was decided, I was choosing between three options.

• Full 3D characters and art — the strongest sense of space, but more art production than one person can sustain.
• Stay 2D, like the original — keeps art costs the same, but "walking across a planet and conquering it" doesn't read well in 2D.
• 3D space + 2D characters (a 2.5D approach) — space, gravity, and collision live in 3D; characters and items stay as 2D sprites.
• 
  

I went with the third option. 

What decided it was being able to separate the cost of designing space from the cost of drawing art.

What I actually built

• A separate repository from day one. The new game lives in its own galaxy/ folder and its own repo, so its files and rules don't mix with the original GameMaker project.

• Unity 6 with 3D URP. 3D space, camera, colliders, and physics stay native; characters and items render as sprites on top.

• The cat always wears her default spacesuit. Environment-appropriate gear deploys automatically instead of letting the player swap it manually per planet.

• The original GameMaker sprite art wasn't thrown away — a separate extraction tool pulls PNGs out of the old project without touching it, so the existing art gets reused directly in Unity.

Where it stands now

It's been 23 days since I locked in the concept and started building Galaxy. 

A demo version is already done, and I'm now purely in testing —

four worlds, three difficulty tiers. 

Balance testing is rough and there are plenty of bugs, 

which is honestly what I was doing when I sat down to write this. 

Boarding the ship, landing on a planet, finishing a conquest and planting a flag — 

all of that already works in a real build.

Here's what walking across a planet and picking up items actually looks like right now —

 the same walkable-planet idea from the top of this post, in a real build.

What's still open

Right now I'm heads-down on balance and bugs. Final art style, 

monetization, whether to support landscape or PC at all, how planet bosses will fight — 

none of that gets decided until movement and the conquest loop itself prove fun.

Want to try it yourself?

Call the Cat: Galaxy is currently in closed testing on Google Play. Here's how to get in:

1. Join the tester group — groups.google.com/g/callthecat_dream
2. Opt in on the testing page — play.google.com/apps/testing/com.runaria81.callthecatgalaxy
3. Install from Google Play — play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.runaria81.callthecatgalaxy

Steps 1 and 2 both need to happen before the Play Store link actually shows you the game 

— that's just how Google's closed testing works.