Dear Community

It's finally time to release the game fully. Doing a remake is quite challenge. So in this section I want to talk a little bit about the old and the new and my oh my ,how far the game has come. I can't believe how much has changed over the years.


This brings back so many memories...

With the remake, I knew what I was working towards but a lot of time has passed since the original's release and I'm not the same person I was back then. My daughter was 4 years old at the time of the original game's release and she's now 8. This offered me the chance to try and make Gilbert fun for young children as well as older ones.

The underlying idea was that capitalizing on how forgiving the game is, younger gamers most likely will not care for harder jumps if they can't make it and as they grow older and more familiar, they eventually will. This is what I experienced with my daughter. She's now a bona fide Gilbert expert.

Play With Gilbert has become a mixture of role-playing and traditional 3d open-world platformers. Customization was a fun little portion of the original but I felt it was incredibly under-utilized on my behalf. I've made sure that the customization aspect is now pretty deep and players should be able to go very far into creating a unique kitty. I hope that in the future I can expand on them even more but as it is, I'm rather quite happy with how it turned out.


I truly hope this will make a lot of new memories!

What's completely new though, are unlockable items. A developer friend of my stressed the fact that adding such a mechanic would add a lot more fun to the game so I decided to give it a go. Each level now has a whole bunch of cat bells that can be collected. If a player collects 100 of them a new item unlocks. After that a selection of hats will be dropped from a different pool. These are the same hats that can be found in the levels themselves. This is done so that there's always something to drive players collecting cat bells.

If, however, players have unlocked everything and / or simply do not want to collect them anymore, you can turn on Role-Play mode. This turns the game back to how Play With Gilbert used to be. I felt it was important to keep the original gameplay alive as much as possible because not everyone wants a collect-a-thon.


I'm a huge fan of the new suburbs area...

Other new features are vehicles and other modes of transportation such as a glider. The completely new map, Down Town, is huge compared to the rest and after adding in vehicles, it was a lot of fun to just play in. Me and my daughter ended up roleplaying so much on there that I decided to add in more small mechanics to embrace that play style. Adding in doors, showers, flushable toilets and physics objects just for the fun of it. We would carry around food and drink items, settle on a spot and role-play eating and drinking, or whatever else crazy stuff we'd come up with.

So, for the past week I've slept very little and am currently super tired yet it's been a lot of fun. I've been so incredibly busy trying to tie up loose ends and fixing bugs and adding in quality of life improvements that I feel the game is at a very healthy state and I am proud to share it with everyone.

Unicorn Supporter Pack DLC

The remake is free for existing users. I did that on purpose because I value each and every one of you! However, I also need to eat and be able to keep working on this game so I decided that I would create a small DLC pack. People have asked me if they could further support my efforts and I felt that this was a nice way of offering something new and fun for existing users to purchase.



The DLC pack contains a unicorn player model which can be activated in the customization menu. Unicorns control slightly different from the regular kitties by design. They don't jump as high initially but they can hover and float upwards. They can also use their horns to make objects that are nearby hover towards them such as fishies and cat bells. Uni-sense is a variation on kitty-sense. Instead of having to hold down the button, you toggle it.

As it currently stands unicorns can not be customized much and while I do not plan to add in hats, what I do want to add are skin variations and customizable eye color. This will be added in a future update not too long from now. One of the goals with this pack was to test out playing as a different character, something I will be expanding upon in the future as well with different DLC packs.

The future of Gilbert

This DLC pack is testing out the water in some ways. As I've mentioned before, I want to commit to the game long-term. The way forward for me will be in the form of themed DLC packs. One of which could be "Farming With Gilbert". A completely new level would be introduced in the form of a farm with new gameplay such as having to collect chicken eggs, and adding in a playable chicken character.

I think this would add longevity to the game as I have a lot more ideas that I want to implement. Other updates would be completely free. Feature requests, bug fixes and such are obviously not tied to DLC, etc.

Missing Content

For those of you who know the original game, there seems to be some stuff missing and you're right. I owe you a beach and moon level as well as parental control options. These will be added some time after this release because I simply didn't have the time to invest on them yet. I do believe that all the new content and feature updates will more than make up for what's missing. Even without the original content this new version is already much bigger and more rich in everything. Oh, and Fish Run will also make its return shortly! Don't you worry!


I'll make sure missing levels are going to return asap for free, no DLC.

Making the levels from scratch isn't easy. I wanted to make sure they generally feel the same but are better executed and much more optimized. I go over what I think people liked in the original and think of ways to make them better or add new things to them. The park level is the closest I got to a 1:1 conversion.

A Small Tail

The free version of PWG was released about a week ago and so far has been received very well. I'm super happy with the response and gave me a much needed confidence boost in assuring me that I made the right decisions in how to update the game. So, for those who are reading this and not sure if the game's for you or your child, go check out the free version first before deciding, please!

Gilbert's Official Play Guide

I'll keep this one short, I mentioned this in the last news post but there is an official play guide right here on steam that I created. It's a tad out of date currently but also a work in progress. I will go back to the guide periodically and make sure it's up-to-date.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2352598832

Bugs and Fixes

If you or your child run into any bugs or other issues, please feel free to post on the forums or join the discord channel. I will do my best to respond as fast as possible and will try to fix any bugs and/or resolve any issues you might have.

If you find anything, a screenshot or video with a descriptive report would help a whole lot.
Report Problems Here

Long Term Investment

Lastly, I want to say thank you! Over the years I've read many comments and reviews and what not and what stood out to me the most is how nice you guys have been to me and each other. Please let Gilbert remain a source of positivity. We all could use some of that in these times.



I plan to continue implementing new ideas, adding both free and DLC content and just making Play With Gilbert a fun experience for all ages!

Join The Community

I've created a stand-alone Discord server for everything Gilbert related. If you need any help, have questions or just want to chat, feel free to join! I discourage kids from participating but if any of them find their way to the server, it's heavily restricted and I will moderate it to the best of my abilities.



Thank you for reading and please take care and have fun with the remake!

Joure