When I look outside my window, I often see our two cats scrabbling up our back wall as they hop over the fence to visit the neighbour's garden. Up and down they go, covering distances seemingly impossible for their tiny, wiry frames, yet without coming to any harm whatsoever. It's an instinct the team at BlueTwelve Studio know all too well, having modelled their unnamed cat protagonist in their debut adventure game Stray after a couple of their own feline companions - and colleagues, it turns out.
"About 80% of the team are cat owners, or are being owned by a cat depending on how you see it," says producer Swann Martin-Raget. "We actually have two cats that are joining us almost everyday at the office and are working with us. The main character is based on one of the director's cats called Murtaugh. He's not an exact copy, but he's the main reference. We also have Oscar, who is a Sphynx, a furless cat, so he's a very good reference for animation because we can clearly see all the movements. We also have a lot of strays that we've adopted, but yeah, we definitely are huge cat lovers and these animals are fascinating to us."