I've loved cats since I was a kid, any cat, anywhere. If there's one nearby, I'm going to go say hello. That never really went away, and over years of traveling it turned into a habit: wherever I go, I end up photographing the local street cats and posting them to my Instagram stories. Every city seems to have its own cat personality, and collecting those little moments became one of my favorite parts of being somewhere new.
At some point it clicked that this was already basically a collection game. I just had the photos, not the catching or the cards. StrayDex is my attempt to turn that habit into something playable: find a real cat, catch it in a quick physics-based mini-game, and turn it into a holographic card you actually keep. By default, it runs entirely on your device: cat detection, card generation, and your save data all stay on your phone unless you choose otherwise. I'm also building toward an optional way to bring your cards online later on, so they can eventually be played with beyond your own device, but playing fully offline will always be a choice you can make, not something you lose. That's also just how I've always experienced this myself: a private little photo diary of cats I've met.
StrayDex is a solo project. No studio, no team, just me building something I wanted to exist. That means updates might be slower than a big studio's, but it also means every detail, down to the yarn-ball physics and the card foil sheen, is something I actually cared about getting right.