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The game that almost shipped without animation
Most tools enter a project at the start, when the pipeline is being built and there's still time to design around them. Ludo didn't get that invitation.
Low expectations, then a quick reversal
Batuhan Pehlivan, co-founder and game designer at Kayalar Studio, found it deep into the development of Catverse Clicker, the studio's debut mobile game. By that point, the characters were done, the game was taking shape, and the team had already worked around the one thing that was missing: animation. His expectations going in were low. What happened next changed the quality of the final product in ways he didn't anticipate.
What actually got built
Catverse Clicker is an idle clicker built around themed cat characters. Players tap, earn Paws, upgrade their cats and shelters, and come back to find progress waiting for them. It's a genre built entirely on feel: the rhythm of interaction, the small hits of feedback, the sense that something is alive on screen.
Not just better-looking, better to play
For most of development, none of that liveliness existed. Every cat character was a static PNG.
The design argument for keeping costs manageable
The constraints were straightforward and hard: nobody on the team had animation expertise, and the project had almost no budget. Traditional animation pipelines were out. Hiring someone was out. Batuhan started looking for another way, without much hope of finding one.
What comes next
Ludo came up during research. Batuhan tried the trial credits with no particular conviction.
Play Catverse Clicker
He subscribed. He ran more detailed sprite generation tests. And in a short time, he understood how to use the system effectively. It was going to work.
Catverse Clicker has 20 themed cat characters. Batuhan designed two animation types for each: an idle animation that plays constantly, and an interaction animation that fires when the player taps. On top of that, he built 20 bowl filling animations for the game's feeding mechanic, one per bowl design, to give players clearer visual feedback on a core interaction.
Sixty animations in total. He built and integrated all of them himself.
The frame rate landed at 16 FPS with 4-second animation durations. The export tools gave him the control he needed to keep sync consistent across animations that were supposed to follow each other, fixing the position shifts and continuity problems that had come up earlier in the workflow.
The cats stopped being art placed on a screen. The feeding animations made actions feel like they meant something. The interaction animations made taps feel responsive. For an idle clicker, where the player does the same things hundreds of times, that shift in feel is not cosmetic.
