MIO: Memories in Orbit News

I recently stumbled on Erostasis, a brilliant and filthy cybernetic microgame in which you are a wiry meatpuppet created to, aha, satisfy the urges of an exceedingly backed-up bionic starship. Over the course of a very busy 20 minutes or so, you visit various self-aware ship systems and play out their kinks. The writing is clattery, theory-drenched and sensual, set to moaning electronica. The visuals are a gunky collage of seeming porno and industrial stock footage. It’s glorious. Probably don’t play it where members of the public can see.

Anyway, if I were to choose a polar opposite of that game it might be new metroidvania Mio: Memories In Orbit, which also takes place on a living ship and is as elegant and videogamey and serenely sexless as Erostasis is subversive and debauched. I really like the looks of Mio, too, for wholly different reasons, and I’m tickled pink that publishers Focus Entertainment have managed to email me about it while I’m still recovering from my Erostasis experience.

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Winter is almost over! But the seasonal devblog is finally here ❄️

We hope you all enjoyed the start of 2025. It’s a big year for MIO!

The game is still set for release this year—no official date yet (👀)! We’ve been working on this project for the last four years. While it’s starting to feel long, we’re still quite hyped by the game so I’d say that’s a good sign!



​We’re now entering the last months of development and there’s still so many things left undone. Little polish, postprocess we wished we could have implemented and hope we will still have time to do it at the last minute.

A lot of small things; this animation that stutters a bit; a room that is already cool but with a bit of time and care from our art director, could be even better; a cinematic which is fine as it is, but adding some flying particles and a little bit of camera polish would do wonders.

This boss that still lacks a bit of balance. This killzone is a little bit too big. This challenge could be a little bit nicer. Or harder. It depends which one we’re talking about.

AND IT’S EVERYWHERE 😬

Never make your own game engine. There was a bug with the hot reload of MIO’s animation. The result in game while playing was incredible 💫

Fortunately, our publisher, Focus Entertainment, is lending us a wonderful QA team. More than 10 people are playing the game everyday, over and over - Many thanks to them for giving us feedback and bug reports, they are wonderful


With this goal in mind, we have been working on a special playtest in the last weeks, specially designed for the bosses.

It was very interesting. The players unfortunately could not experience much of the “exploration and backtracking” side of the game in this time frame, but we tried to put them as much as possible in real condition in front of most of the game bosses.

I say “most of” because even in four full days of playtests, there was not enough time for everyone to test every boss.



The results were generally quite positive and will allow us to work on the less satisfying encounters. Here is a quick insight of the results for the first boss of the game.



We learned a lot from this playtest. In this example, it led to several changes.
There is now a health fountain not far from the boss that the players can find if they look for it. We changed its intro animation and the look of his arena. He is now a little bit more difficult : some playtesters killed him a bit too fast for our taste.

We polished several of his animations in order to make him easy to understand, but still a little difficult to beat. It’s only the first boss after all, we don’t want him to be horribly hard to beat but he still needs to be a worthy challenge.



The team on the game is getting progressively smaller while we quit the production process and we’re now only in post production. It’s so long to make a game! 😵‍

We also made a big lunch & secret santa at the end of December. The studio offered some MIO t-shirts to everyone. They’re very soft and comfy, it’s so fun to make goodies!



It was a calm period since most of us took some vacations and well deserved rest. After all, winter = snow = AWESOME ☃️

Ino definitely agrees with that !



​Best winter for you all.

See you in spring! 🌟



https://store.steampowered.com/app/1672810/MIO_Memories_in_Orbit/

[h2]Hey everyone! ✨[/h2]

Once again we want to express our gratitude towards you for following the project. Reading your comments and seeing the wishlist grow makes us incredibly proud and excited (and a bit frightened too)! 💙
We saw that some of you are still confused with the game; in terms of challenge, let us clarify that for you!



MIO is a metroidvania, therefore, it will be a challenging game.
We often have playtesters telling us, at the beginning of their run, that they are afraid the game is going to be too casual because of the cute and poetic art style.
Worry not, that is not what we aim for! So far, none of the players, testers or journalists got to the end without breaking a serious sweat or ended up thinking MIO was too easy.

Most realistically, you will die. A lot.





Even if MIO is going to have very demanding moments, there will also be more calm ones. We want to find balance between narration, mystery, exploration AND challenging platforming and combat moments.

Mio is a “lightweight” character, she’s agile and fast but quite fragile and lighter than most enemies she encounters. We wanted you to feel that.

It’s so exciting for us to see people gracefully dancing around obstacles & enemies after they’ve played for a while.

For sure you will retry and get better with every attempt! But the goal is to be fair so you should always be able to reach the end of the game. And that required a lot of iteration (still does !).

For the most adventurous of you, we’ve added several secret paths with special levels.
We hope you will like them. ;)





We're working hard on the game and have just finished implementing all translations and voice over. There are going to be a lot of language options, we're happy so many people will be able to play the game in their native language!!

All the recordings went very well, we're very happy with the results. It was a little bit stressful since the main cinematics' emotions rely on those but we believe the result will be worth the effort.
In the end the actors & staff were amazing and it feels great to finally have them in the game!

All translations available, voiced languages in yellow



We’ve been working on implementing a real choir into the game’s soundtrack in order to find the "between robot and human" feel we wanted. We always wanted to have this contrast between the colder “sci fi” synths and the more organic human voices. Up until now our composer was working with small excerpts or placeholder voices, but no more !

We found a studio in Paris to do that, it took two days of recordings and a lot of work for our composer and singers. The results are simply amazing, and we’re sure you’ll love it too! 🎶


Recording session at Midilive Studio, Paris

Since we’re currently in the polishing process, the game is getting better everyday. It is such an exciting (and tiring) period.
For now we’re still implementing and debugging everything. It’s a lot of work and we don’t have much time so… we’re in a bit of a rush !



We have so many things we could show you but we don’t want to spoil too much…For those of you already enjoying snowy landscapes at home, and for those of you that wish you could see some snow this winter, how about this new snowfall that made it into the game just now? We have so many things we could show you but we don’t want to spoil too much…



Thanks a lot and see you next time! ⭐

We wanted to do this devblog just after the announcement trailer but time flies and it’s already August! 😱

The announcement itself was quite terrifying between not knowing if we wanted Silksong to be announced (we just want to play it too of course) or not (Well, It'd have been a bit bad for us, even though we are convinced that MIO has a lot to give!)

All the comments and love we received was so heartwarming, thank you so much!! 💙

One of the first concept art by our art director, Etienne

We had some wonderful feedback on the game, the graphics and flow was almost unanimously praised which was a huge release since we were not completely sure it was going to work.

Behind every iteration was only the simple question of “do you like it better or less now?”, in a quite disorganised way of doing things but in the end we’re quite proud of what we managed to achieve !

We’ve been working on this project for the last three and a half years. No one outside the studio (except some playtesters) had seen it, so showing it at the Nintendo Direct was such a great opportunity but also a bit intimidating.

Some old moodboards for the game made by our art director, Etienne

[h3]How it started[/h3]

It has changed a lot since the beginning of course!
We started with a very simple pitch : “A metroidvania game with a hook in a science fiction universe”. And then it morphed into what it is now.

We’ll try sharing some parts of the process in the next months. It was our first time doing this kind of gameplay and non linear experience. We had to experiment a lot.

A very important thing: the code name of the project is FLAMBY because of the look of our main character in the very first prototype of the game. I think we’ll always call it Flamby with the team, it has become such a habit.

One of the first prototype for the game

[h3]New keyart[/h3]

With the team, we were also working on new main art for the game, even more representative of MIO's universe. Today, we're thrilled to show it to you!


We had the chance of having a wonderful team for this project and we can't thank everyone enough for all they did and are still doing as we speak. It’s a small team (around 15/20 people at the most crowded moment) so everyone was a big part of the process!

The Team - by Julia & Camille ("Merci ! On vous aime" meaning "Thanks! We love you!")

[h3]Our tiny cosy studio[/h3]

Our studio is located in an old movie theatre and we can use the common parts regularly so it’s always great to go out to the garden in order to take a break or talk about the game in a friendly environment!



Plus it’s always a good opportunity to bring Ino outside to play with us 😁
Ino is the dog of our producer, she’s an Old German Shepherd and definitely a big part of the studio! She’s a very calm dog, often present during video calls and meetings and definitely a big source of distraction and smiles. ✨

Our little studio and wonderful dog, Ino

[h3]We were at Gamescom[/h3]

We will keep working on the game in the next months and polish the game!

In the meantime, we have finally shown the game to journalists at Gamescom. It was quite intimidating but everyone was very nice and it was a great experience !
We also went to visit the indie area in the event, there were so many amazing games, you should definitely keep an eye out. Some great things to come 😉



If you're interested in finding out more about MIO, we have a X (Twitter) account where we regularly post content about the game. Don't hesitate to follow us!

We’ll keep you in touch!



https://store.steampowered.com/app/1672810/MIO_Memories_in_Orbit/

Something unusual is happening on the Vessel spaceship. Nobody knows why the Pearls, its AI caretakers, have stopped functioning…

Dive into the reveal trailer and prepare yourself to unveil the secrets of MIO's journey! 👾

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Embark with Mio, a small robot who mysteriously lost his memories after a tragic blackout happened on the vast spaceship he woke up in. Use your extraordinary abilities to conquer the wild environments of the Vessel, gathering clues and fragments of the past to figure out what pushed this enormous technological ark to cease functioning.

Surrounded by mesmerizing and handcrafted aesthetics, you’ll have to learn precision, rhythm and timing to progress through this decaying but sumptuous world. Master the perfect flow to stay ahead in the ever-changing environment of the Vessel! Repair damaged robots, fight a wide range of enemies, browse fields of ruins, lush vegetation and don’t let enemies catch you off-guard!



Will you dare to go in-depth into the spaceship? Are you ready to confront Mio’s tragic memories?

You’ll find out in 2025! Game will be available on Playstation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch!

We can’t wait to share you more content, and be sure that additional information will be provided to you in the upcoming months!





https://store.steampowered.com/app/1672810/MIO_Memories_in_Orbit/