I finally added a stand-in achievements system to hopefully make dying a bit more fun and worthwhile, and to maybe encourage the player to interact with the cat.

Technical Breakdown of the Achievement GUI

My biggest hurdle was trying to work with Adventure Game Studio's engine. In the end, the achievement system is actually the INVENTORY of a second character called "steve" (short for "Achievement Steve").

When the game begins, I add all of the achievements as inventory items to Steve's inventory. When the player clicks the achievement button on the menu bar, the game switches to Steve, then opens the GUI that contains Steve's inventory. I had to set every inventory item as not clickable (I think?) so that you wouldn't drag the items the way a normal inventory would work. Then I wrote custom code in the Global Script that would allow me to use the "interact" to "collect" the achievement.

It's still a bit glitchy looking, in terms of that left-clicking, but maybe adding an animation / vfx effect later will help minimize it.