News / Devlog
Power Kittens says words out loud (and other things four-year-olds demanded)
Our kids' game Power Kittens looks like a rescue game — an orange firefighter kitten, a truck, a hose. Underneath, it's quietly a language and numbers game, built around one observation: kids this age learn with their ears first.
Words, spoken
The game talks. When a word matters, the game says it — and then plays with its synonyms, so "big" arrives with "huge" and "enormous" in tow. A four-to-seven-year-old doesn't need a vocabulary drill; they need to hear that words come in families, at the exact moment the word is attached to something on fire (in a friendly way). The speech layer is built into the game itself, not bolted on, and it works offline like everything else.
Counting things that count
Numbers in Power Kittens are always of something — fires still burning, kittens rescued. That's how counting sticks at this age: not as digits, but as answers to "how many are left?" when you badly want the answer to be zero.
The demands of the QA department
The playtesters are small and merciless, and every one of their rulings shaped the game (the full story is in making a game with kids): menus lost, the game speaks because they can't read yet, it works offline because car rides exist, and there are no ads because kids can't defend against them — so there will never be any. Free to play; a single one-time purchase will unlock a big pack of extra levels, and that's the entire monetization story. No subscription, ever.
Play Power Kittens → — free, in the browser, made by the same tiny studio as the rest of our games.