Mewgenics News

Okay, it's time to go over different types of combat events as well as some of the interactive entities you may encounter on your quest! LET'S GO!!!!


As you traverse the many biomes of the Mewgenics universe, you'll notice a varying degree of unique-looking tile types. Enemies and allies will be affected by these tiles in unique ways by standing on or moving through them. Here are a few examples of them.


[h3]Tall Grass[/h3]

Standing in tall grass tiles will allow a unit (both enemy and friendly) a 50% dodge chance, making whatever stands inside it much harder to hit. This evasive bonus gives you a strategic reason to hide in grass while attacking or retreat to it when in danger. Tall grass has its downsides, though; it's very flammable, so not only will fire ignite it, but it will also spread through adjacent flammable tiles! Tall grass is also susceptible to high winds.


[h3]Fire[/h3]

Fire tiles not only destroy flammable tiles and items but also apply burn to units standing or moving through them. Burn deals damage over time equal to the burn value, but it diminishes over time. Flame tiles also diminish themselves if left alone over time but can also be extinguished instantly by any water element effect, the same goes for burn. Using wind element on fire will not only spread and duplicate the flame tiles, but applying wind to burn will also stoke those flames as well. And as you may assume, burning units will ignite any flammable tiles they walk through.


[h3]Water[/h3]

Water tiles make it harder for units without flying to pass through, requiring 2 movements to cross 1 water tile. Water tiles also apply a water element to units, making them wet and causing some issues with water-soluble items. Water tiles are conductive, so the electric element will apply its effects to ALL units within any connected water tiles; also, wet units standing adjacent to water tiles will allow the electric element to spread through them to other water tiles or wet units. Wet units are immune to burn but more susceptible to cold elements. So be careful! There are many other interesting elemental combos with water tiles, but I won't spoil them all... just imagine the possibilities!





[h2]Interactive Objects[/h2]
Each area of the game features some type of interactive object, from piles of glass and tires to cactuses and boulders. Each new chapter will yield something new and interesting to play with.

[h3]Trash Bags[/h3]

Trash bags are basically punching bags filled to the brim with interesting goodies! Each time a bag is damaged, a random pickup will come flying out of it! (And yes, you can light bags on fire). These pickup ranges from meat to metal scrap... and if you can fully destroy this bag, you may find an extra surprise... or maybe nothing at all; these bags are a mystery!


[h3]Small Rocks[/h3]
These little rocks look like set decorations until an enemy unit throws one at you! Interacting with rocks by attacking them will send them flying in a straight line, smashing into whatever they hit and dealing damage. These hard little projectiles act like improvised weapons for you and enemy units, so make sure you watch out; some enemies are much smarter than you'd assume. Also, rocks are of the rock element; I'm not going to explain why that matters, but it will matter to you eventually.

Enemies

Basic enemies are the meat and potatoes of Mewgenics. By the end of the year, the game will feature roughly 200 of them, each one unique. Basic enemies can also be "champions"; Isaac players will instantly know what that means, but Mewgenics also features "elites", even beefier versions of existing enemies that have extra effects!


[h3]Kittens[/h3]
Kittens are your basic melee unit, but kittens are scaredy-cats and will fully move away when damaged from whatever damaged them, making them annoying. But they are also dumb, so they may just run through fire or glass! Bonus!


[h3]Charger Rat[/h3]
Charger rats are very slow units that attempt to line up with any of your units then charge full speed at them when they do! Luckily, they can only do this in cardinal directions, so they are easy to telegraph but will eventually lock you in if you aren't careful.


[h3]Mangey[/h3]
Mangeys are ranged units whose attacks have a chance to poison (poison is a straightforward damage over time status effect), but they also have a passive effect: they are infested with maggots! Each time a mangey is damaged, it spawns a maggot in an adjacent space, so think twice about trying to kill this unit with a death of a thousand cuts... or the maggot army will make short work of you!


[h3]Maggot[/h3]

Maggots are a "tiny" enemy unit. Tiny units have very low stats but usually come in larger numbers, so AOE (Area Of Effect) attacks are most useful when dealing with mobs of them.

Mini Bosses

Mini bosses are a skill check at the midpoint of each chapter before it branches into 2 paths. Every chapter features a mini boss; these beefy units always feature bonus turns, special attacks, and a lot of extra HP.

[h3]Lucy (the mage)[/h3] Lucy is one of a few class-based mini bosses, and she comes with an array of elemental spells at her disposal. Since her spells are big, she needs time to prime them and will show a visual tell to what she's doing and where it will go on the turn before she unleashes them, but her bonus turn will make things a bit more complicated than you may assume. Lucy cycles through these three spells.


MC Blizz

All units in a large AOE around the caster become frozen solid, essentially losing their next turn.

MC Flamethrower
A cone attack that deals damage, inflicts burn, and lights flammable objects on fire.

MC Thunder
A huge blast spell that sends off lightning in all diagonal directions, and yes it has a chance to stun you!




As you would assume, bosses are your final challenge in a chapter, each boss is very different and usually features an array of attacks and passive abilities to contend with.

[h3]Radical Rat[/h3]
This is the first boss you encounter, and we consider him a "puzzle boss". On each one of his bonus turns, he will toss a "rat bomb" next to your cats.


On his final turn, Radical Rat will hide inside a trash bin and detonate all his bombs! Each bomb explodes in a cross pattern in all cardinal directions, and bombs are flammable, so they can easily chain-react even if they are defused! So watch out!


There are a few strategies you can use to take this dude down, but we will let you figure them out for yourself, in like a year or something...

Bye bye,
-Edmund

A common question we get when we talk about Mewgenics or show in-game screenshots is, "What happened to hoarding and breeding cats in your house and collecting furniture?"

The short answer to that is, that's all still in and a foundational element of the game, but for this blog post, I'll dive into the long answer.

This is your home in Mewgenics!



Pretty basic, an empty, rundown, abandoned shack with a few cats in it. But with some effort, that little shack could grow into something like this!



Or even THIS!




The house hub is where the action happens, not only because that's where the cats get it on, but it's also where time exists. I've gone over it in a previous post many months ago, so I'll do a quick recap of how the house hub works.



See those numbers up there? The meat is how many units of food you currently have; the cat head shows how many cats currently live in your house. If you click pass day, each cat in your house will consume 1 unit of food, it becomes night, a simulation will run to see what cats mated/had babies, got into fights, or experienced something worth noting, then the next day starts.



This day/night cycle will push you through weeks, months, seasons, and even years as you play. But more on that later, let's go over the house HUD real quick.



[h2]Furniture Tab[/h2]
This tab will put you in "edit mode" and allow you to click and drag the many pieces of furniture you've collected on your adventures or purchased at "Jack's Shack", allowing you to tetris together the perfect hoarder house filled to the brim with magical furniture that will change the cats living in that room into the perfect monstrosity.




[h2]Examine Cat Mode[/h2]
This tab will help you get more detailed info on whatever cat you are holding in your house. This makes it a lot easier to parse through your growing army to form the perfect party for your next adventure, or maybe you just want to find out the best breeding combo so you can lock them in the attic and pray they don't end up killing one another when someone makes a move...




[h2]Item Storage[/h2]
This tab opens up to show you your current item collection. A few items you collect on your adventure can be stored here for future use. This will help greatly for trying to collect item sets as well as storing that sweet shotgun for any possible home invasions. The storage may look tiny now, but much like everything in Mewgenics, this too can be greatly upgraded over time. You just gotta know the right person to talk to...




[h2]The Map[/h2]
This tab opens up your local map. Not only will this tab allow you to visit local shops with ease, but it will also show the current favor earned from each NPC as well as alert of any of them that may want to have a word with you. What is favor, you ask? Well, it's simply how much an NPC likes you. Each time you do an NPC a solid, or send them a specific type of cat over the course of the game, their favor will go up, and each time you meet a specific threshold of favor, that NPC will "give you something". For example, Frank is a great contractor! Don't let his hump throw you; this thing is very good with a hammer... sounds like a threat, and maybe it is. But if you are in need of an attic, extra bedroom, or whatever, tending to the needs of Frank is where you wanna be.





That about covers the basics of the house hub, so I'll just leave you with this gif of some ragdoll physics.



-Edmund

Whenever we post a screenshot or gif of Mewgenics someone is bound to ask "is this the final look of the game" or "why does it look so bled out color wise?", So I think it's time to tackle these questions and show off some newer screen shots for the store page and even a high rez video of the game.

So why are the colors so desaturated? A few reasons, the first being to set a mood, Mewgenics is intended to feel drab, dark, old and dreary. It's very important to me that the game has these visual themes, so the bleached out Technicolor visuals of the game are there to set this tone. Second, and most importantly, the game looks this way to say to the viewer "this isn't like other games" this isn't your average game, this game is weird, this game is mildly off putting and this game is meant to go against the grain of what you'd expect from a game about cute cats. Much like the themes in Isaac, I think its important for people to instantly see that this games goal isn't trying to be a bright and shiny traditional video game experience, its trying to immerse you in this a unique world where something is very very off. 



Another huge reason why Mewgenics has the visuals it does is because when I started prototyping the original idea of mew I really wanted to make it in the style of a 1930s-40s cartoon.. keep in mind this was back in 2012, long before the reign of Cuphead.



When we restarted development on Mewgenics nearly 5 years ago I was torn on if we should go for the whole old cartoon look, there was no way we could do it as well as Cuphead, but if we didn't commit to the intended style we run the risk of the visual theme falling flat. So we have been working hard on effects and filters to nail down that style. Anyway here is the nearly final version of the Mewgenics visual style in all its film grain glory!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

pretty neat right?
NOW ON TO THE SPOILER IMAGES!































xoxo
-Edmund

So after many years of development and a butt ton of dev blog posts, I think its time to pull back the curtain a bit and talk about launch and the current state of the game.

As of the time of this post we are roughly 11 months away from being content complete, most would assume that means we launch around new year but that probably won't be the case.

Some of you were there for the launch of Bumbo as well as Afterbirth+, Two of my worst launches and both launches went wrong because we locked a release date too early then crunched too hard to hit it. Mewgenics is special, easily the game I'm most proud of and a joy to work on... I DONT WANT TO FUCK IT UP! So once we are content complete we will nail down a reasonable launch date in early 2025 and announce it, but till then we will continue this song and dance to lay the groundwork on what this game is all about, and give some behind the scenes info on the development process.

now on to the content! ...

Remember the radio? You know that thing that still kind of exists that we no longer use? Well Mewgenics has its own radio station, WMEW 99.9. This station plays out while you are in your house hub, tending to your cats, expanding your house, and placing your furniture. Much like Mewgenics gameplay, the radio is also randomly generated featuring tons of musical tracks introduced by a voice you all know and love: Matthias Bossi (narrator for The Binding of Isaac). in this clip we also dive into another amazing addition to WMEW, Jimmy "The Hammer" Valentine ( voiced/created by Carl Edge of Fishmasters ). there are tons of bits done by Carl, Matthias and many others to really create that illusion of a free form radio show beamed in directly to your game!



We often get asked what the hell is the Mewgenics story about? and my honest response is that mewgenics is less about telling a story and more about allowing the player to live in this mewgenics world of boon county and letting their actions in the world and interactions with NPCs slowly form a story... but more on that later.

enjoy!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Last post we finished up our main class intros when we went over the Fighter class. But there's still one more "class" left to cover, and that is Collarless!



Collarless is not a class in the same sense as the other classes we've shown off, but represents "Unclassed" cats and a large set of common abilities that are available to every class. Strays and kittens are all born with one random collarless active ability by default, and either a basic melee attack or a basic short-ranged attack. If you want a fancier basic attack, give them a collar! Their starting abilities are kept when you assign a class collar however, so their starting ability is a pretty good way to inform your class choice, if you are unsure.

When a cat levels up, if abilities or passives are offered, some of them will be collarless abilities and some of them will be class abilities, depending on your Luck stat (higher Luck = more chance for class abilities to show up instead of collarless). Collarless abilities are *usually* worse than class abilities, but many of them are designed to fill gaps to round out your cat, or even be very strong in very specific situations, so sometimes that collarless ability might just be exactly what you need.



If you depart on an adventure without giving a collar to a cat, it will learn one random collarless active and one random collarless passive upon depart, (the same way a classed cat learns a random class active and passive), but it will remain purely collarless the whole adventure, and does not receive any innate bonus stats the way classed cats do. Only collarless abilities will be offered on level up. It's uh, not a good strategy, but there for those looking for a challenge. Please put collars on your cats!

Anyway, lets go over a few Collarless abilities now.


Active abilities cost mana to use, but you can keep using them as many times as you want during your turn as long as you have the mana to cast them. Here's a few examples of collarless active abilities you might get offered when your cats level up. There are over 100 collarless actives that can show up on level up, and cats of any class can get offered them instead of class abilities.

[h2]Roll[/h2]
Roll is a simple movement ability that lets you roll up to 3 tiles away in a straight line, even through obstacles and enemies.



[h2]Butt Scoot[/h2]
Butt Scoot lets you move 1 tile in any direction and leave behind a maggot familiar when you do. Check out the Hunter post if you want a reminder of how familiars work!



[h2]Spit[/h2]
Spit is an infinite range, 1-damage projectile attack with water element. Check out the Mage post if you want a reminder of how elements work!



[h2]Play Dead[/h2]
When you use play dead, you immediately down yourself, but do not get injured. Normally when you get downed, you get an injury that is a permanent stat debuff. This ability is significantly more useful than you'd think at first!



[h2]Copy Cat[/h2]
Copy Cat is always a copy of the last ability an ally cat used. Pay attention to that turn order in the top right!



[h2]Burst[/h2]
Burst is a high damage infinite range magical attack with a reasonable mana cost, however you can only cast it once per battle.



[h2]Ponder[/h2]
Increase your intelligence by 1 (for the duration of the battle). Costs 4 mana to use, and as a reminder intelligence increases your mana regen by 1. Math out if its worth it, nerds!



[h2]Metronome[/h2]
Upon use, casts a random cat ability (any ability cats can learn, classed or collarless). The cat will automatically target the ability it chooses (and its only gonna select abilities that have reasonable targets). Is it fun? Oh hell yes. Is it good? Uh...




Passive abilities do not cost mana and don't need to be "used". As long as your cat has the passive, it just constantly effects them in some way. Here's a few examples of passive abilities you might get offered when your cats level up. There are over 50 collarless passives that can show up on level up, and cats of any class can get offered them instead of class passives.

[h2]Might of the Meek[/h2]
Any damage you deal that is 2 or less is always a critical hit.



[h2]Mini Me[/h2]
At the start of the battle spawn a half sized familiar version of yourself with half of your stats. Your mini-me has all of the same abilities and passives and items that you do, but is AI controlled (you better hope he does what you want!)



[h2]Dirty Claws[/h2]
If you attack a poisoned or bleeding enemy with any physical attack or ability, Dirty Claws causes that enemy to gain an extra stack of Poison and/or Bleed. Amplify those debuffs! Check out the Thief post if you want a reminder of how Poison works!



[h2]Skill Share[/h2]
Skill Share is a passive that duplicates your other passive onto all of your other cats (during battle only). If you're wondering if that has the potential to be extremely broken... well... it absolutely does.



And with that, we are done with class intros. We have covered all the classes and there definitely aren't any other secret classes in the game. nope. no way. So I'm handing the blog posts back over to Edmund for the next one, maybe he'll write about poop or something! See you then!

- Tyler