Aug 20, 2026
Prompts Are a Shell, Not a Chat
A design note on treating agent prompts as a command-line grammar: subcommands, flags, globs, and pipeline composition over abilities and skills.
C.A.T. is Cat Game Research’s from-scratch C++20/Vulkan engine and playable research platform. ECS gameplay, local LLM agents, custom physics, and ML compute tools share one codebase — so we can build worlds, test ideas, train models, and publish the tools behind them. Across the studio’s public network, those systems become games, experiments, papers, and tools that others can explore.
"We are star stuff." ~Carl Sagan
If you are a frontier AI researcher and you are interested in our research and our data, please contact us. We welcome collaboration, dataset access, and joint experiments on behavioral intelligence, reinforcement learning, and custom engine architecture.
Contact UsA retro UNIX mainframe BBS and browser OS for the Cat Game Research community. IRC-like channels, ASCII consoles, and console curses widgets.
> OPEN_MUXThe world’s first AI prompt compiler compacts, lints, fuzzes, and scans your prompt files for malware and code — before they reach your agents.
> MEET_CICRecent updates across the C.A.T. ecosystem.
A design note on treating agent prompts as a command-line grammar: subcommands, flags, globs, and pipeline composition over abilities and skills.
A project-owned Emscripten build, a fixed audio buffer bug, and measured LTO/SIMD results for the SNES WASM emulator.
The Compact Instruction Compiler adds a synonym-canonicalization pass that preserves code spans and file paths while shrinking prose.
Tracing the SPC700 for 1000 frames to find where Super Mario World loads its BRR samples — and proving static disassembly wrong.
Each portal covers a different facet of the C.A.T. project — from API documentation and benchmark reports to security scans, dream consolidation, behavioral research tools, community guilds, and products.
A from-scratch game engine, built with C++20 and Vulkan. No engines, no frameworks — just code.
C.A.T. is a custom game engine and game built entirely from scratch using C++20 and the Vulkan API. It features a deferred PBR rendering pipeline, an ECS architecture with explicit system lifecycles, a particle VFX system with ribbon trails and lifetime curves, side-scroll gameplay with physics-based player movement, and a full asset pipeline with custom importers and VPak packaging.
Beyond the engine itself, the project explores reinforcement learning for Go gameplay (PPO + MCTS), behavioral intelligence research tools, and a comprehensive security infrastructure with an encrypted crypt keeper, port guard, and pentest suites.
C.A.T. stands on the shoulders of open-source projects, hardware platforms, and game distribution technology. These are ecosystem technologies used by or relevant to C.A.T. — not sponsorship claims.
Press and hold any mark for one second to open its official site.
Steam and the Steam logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Valve Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. C.A.T. is not sponsored, endorsed, or affiliated with Valve.
C.A.T. guilds are independent, self-organized community groups — lore, modding, speedrun, roleplay, security, research, or anything in between. Each guild gets its own page at slug.guilds.catgameresearch.net, a slot on the network leaderboard, and a place in the cooperative map.
The guild model is built on two ideas we have written about on Frontier: Rabbit Island (how cooperation, clans, and repeated-play reputation emerge from simple local rules) and After MANGO (distributed ownership, platform cooperatives, and the practical design of shared-capital organizations). A guild is a small cooperative with its own identity, nested inside a larger one.
Reserve a name and apply for a guild page below. No server-side form is used — your request opens as a pre-addressed email with the subject line we use to route applications.
Guild names must be URL-safe and unique. We reserve the right to reject names that conflict with existing guilds, trademarks, or network conventions. Submitted guilds are reviewed before a guild page is provisioned.
C.A.T. is independent and self-funded. Founder memberships provide direct financial support for engine development, hardware costs, and research infrastructure. Members get early access, behind-the-scenes updates, and a voice in the roadmap.
Payments processed securely via Stripe. Cancel anytime. All members receive the same ad-free, tracker-free experience across all Cat Game Research portals.
