Why the game screen has no ads (and never will)
I built Catchmemeow as a present. It started as a homemade gift for my wife and our little ones — a cat-catching game drawn the way our favorite picture books are drawn, all bold ink outlines and flat, cheerful colors. And when you make something for the people you tuck in at night, some decisions stop being decisions at all. This was the easiest one: the screen where a kid is playing will never show an ad. Not a banner along the bottom, not a video between rounds, not a "watch this to keep going." Never.
People sometimes assume there's a clever business reason hiding behind that. There isn't. There's a dad reason. I know exactly which small hands are going to be tapping this screen, because they live in my house.
A calm place to be little
Here is the whole design philosophy, and it fits in a sentence: the game should feel like a picture book that happens to purr. You open it, you find cats, sometimes the cats are wearing hats, and nothing on the screen wants anything from you.
That "nothing wants anything from you" part took real work, because so much of what games normally do is want things. So we cut all of it. The game is free. There are no accounts, so nobody has to invent a password for a person who cannot yet spell their own name. There are no timers, because a three-year-old does not need a countdown breathing down her neck. And there is no way to lose. You cannot fail at Catchmemeow. You can only keep finding cats until you're done finding cats, and then you can go find a snack.
Ads would poison every bit of that, and they'd do it in one tap. An ad is, by definition, a stranger in the room — something we didn't draw, didn't choose, and can't promise is gentle. Every other pixel in the game came out of our own code: every cat, dog, hat, world and treasure is drawn procedurally, circles and rectangles and paths, no image files at all. We can vouch for all of it. We cannot vouch for an ad, so an ad doesn't get to stand next to the cats. It's that simple, and it stays that simple.
Your progress lives at your house
No accounts means something else we care about: the game doesn't know who you are, and it doesn't need to. Progress is saved right on your family's own device. The treasures your kid has collected — there are 121 of them hiding across 25 worlds, each world with its own palette and landmarks and music — live on your tablet or your phone, not on some server of ours. We never see them. Honestly, we'd rather hear about them the old-fashioned way, which is a kid holding a screen two inches from your face saying look look look.
There's a nice side effect to building things this way. Because every critter comes from a seeded random-number generator — the same seed always redraws the same critter — the worlds get built fresh every single round and yet nothing is ever truly lost. The game can always draw your cat again. It's a small thing, but it means the whole game is more like a recipe than a warehouse. We don't store your stuff; we just remember how to make it.
So how does the workshop keep its lights on?
Fair question, and I'd rather answer it plainly than let anyone wonder. Servers cost money. Domain names cost money. This is still a homemade project, but homemade projects have bills too.
Here's the arrangement we landed on. The game is a no-ads zone, forever. The articles — pages like this one, written for grownups, the notes and the reading-with-your-coffee parts of the site — those can carry ads. A parent skimming an essay about procedural cat-drawing is in a completely different situation than a kid mid-game. One of those people can roll their eyes at a banner and scroll past it. The other one is four.
Someday we'd also like to open a small shop — emphasis on small. Nothing that gates the game, nothing a kid has to buy to keep playing. The free things stay free, including the coloring pages, which I'm still a little delighted by: they're generated by the very same engine that draws the game, the art drawing itself in black and white so your kid can put the color back in. We recently rebuilt the whole game on React and TypeScript, and the one thing we refused to change was that hand-drawn engine. It's the heart of the thing. The coloring pages are it, quietly showing off.
So that's the deal, out loud: ads on the reading pages, never on the playing screen, and maybe someday a modest shelf of things to buy if you feel like it. If the day ever comes when that math doesn't work, the ads still don't move into the game. We'd sooner shrink than break the promise.
The cats this is really about
One more thing, because it's the part of the workshop I care about most. Our family's real pets — Max, Yogi, Penny and Mika — are in the game. Actual residents of our actual house, redrawn in circles and paths and bold ink lines. And the quiet mission tucked under all this cat-catching is to nudge families, gently and without a lecture, toward adopting and fostering shelter pets. That's why the site links to Austin Pets Alive and other rescues. There are real cats out there, right now, who would very much like to be somebody's Penny.
That mission is another reason the play screen stays clean. It would feel crooked to say "we made you a calm, kind place because we love cats and kids" and then rent out corners of that place to whoever's bidding. The game is the gift. You don't tape a coupon to a gift.
So if you've ever handed your phone to a small person, watched them tap a cat in a hat, and wondered whether some interruption was about to ambush the moment: it isn't. Not today, not next year. The hats will always fit — we drew the critters that way on purpose — and the screen will always be all cats, no strangers. That's the promise, from our workshop to your couch.