Mewgenics News

I think if you were to show someone the trailer for Mewgenics, complete with cats you-know-whating, a musical number, and a poop joke, they'd probably be taken quite aback. However, if you were to tell them that it's from the same people that made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, I'm sure they'd be able to understand much quicker. Aside from coming from some pretty notable indie devs, there still might be the question of why it's such a big deal that Mewgenics finally got a trailer, and the answer to that is (kind of) simple: it was announced 13 years ago.

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2012 was quite a year. Barack Obama was re-elected, PC Gamer selected Mass Effect 3 as Game of the Year, and Binding of Isaac studio teased its next game, an "adorably horrible" kitty-cat mutation simulator called Mew-Genics...
Read more.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

how cool was that!?

The trailer was made by the amazing Flynn Papandrea and features the musical stylings of Ridiculon!

There is a lot in there to unpack; feel free to watch it a few times, memorize it, and show your friends and family! (Seriously, help spread the word!)

Now on to a little dev blog update.

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The last month has been very focused on adding in all the remaining late-game bosses, tuning mid-game bosses, hooking up cutscenes, and locking down the designs for the remaining final bosses.

We also realized a mid/late-game boss just wasn't as memorable as the others in that cycle, so we decided to expand it greatly, including a whole new musical track by Ridiculon! (Personally one of my favorite tracks currently.)

Next on the list for this month:

- Draw and animate the very final boss.
This boss also needs custom background art, so we gotta get on that as well.

- Add in overworld map visual mini cutscenes.
We have had placeholder map progression for ages and just now got all the new map art by Sony_Shock rigged up to be animated. It should help with visualizing the lay of the land and your adventure's progress.

- Implement remaining mutations/items.
We recently hired a new programmer (Steve Swink) to help with the mini mountain of mutations that still need to be implemented.

- Balance act 3.
Outside of the big bad final boss, I'll also be bouncing around act 3 and attempting to tune and balance it so it feels substantial difficulty-wise without being utterly crushing.

We are also polishing things up a bit more so the game can look extra spicy for our first hands-on video we are doing with IGN; it should come out next month. Once we have broken the seal with that, we may start doing a few streams—depending on when we lock down the release date. More on that next month.

Exciting times! :)

-Edmund

Hey, Tyler here! Part of the work over the past month has been rebalancing and reworking some of the existing bosses in the game, (mostly ones in the middle third of the game, as everything in the first third is pretty well tuned at this point). Believe it or not, not every boss we make works well on the first try. Crazy eh? So I'd figure I'd go over a bit about what makes a good boss in this type of game and how we approach rebalancing and reworking and testing existing bosses, for a little bit of development insight here.

So lets start with what makes a good boss in Mewgenics?
Well, a boss's roll in any game is to test a player in the skills that they should have acquired at that point in the game. For Mewgenics there's 2 major categories of skill to test here, your tactical decision making, and your ability to build a team. For early-run bosses, the only thing we can reasonably test in a boss fight is tactical decision making, as you haven't had that many teambuilding decisions yet. For later bosses, they need to also be a test of your ability to build a functional team.

Now, Mewgenics is a Tactical Strategy game, so you need to be able to use strategy and tactics to beat a boss. The ones that work are the ones that let you do this, and the bosses that "don't work" typically feel more like "big meatbags" where you just hit them and hope you kill them before they kill you. Those bosses fulfill the role of a gear check (testing your team building skill) but fail at properly testing your moment to moment tactical decision making. That's no good, and the bosses that feel like that get added to the queue for a redesign. We've gotten better at this as we worked on the game, but probably about half of the bosses have needed at least a minor redesign to make fun.

Unfortunately most of the bosses I was working on this month are all past the spoiler wall so I can't show them. But I can use examples of other bosses we have shown before, which went through tweaks, redesigns and rebalances in the past.


He throws bombs. They explode. You can dodge the bombs, or tank them, or use an attack to defuse the bombs instead of hitting the rat, or try to manipulate the rat into getting hit by his own bombs, or try to burst down the rat before the bombs even explode, or stun him so he can't throw bombs, or understand how how AI works and try to manipulate where he throws the bombs, or any number of other things. This is what a good early game boss is like.



Radical Rat was the very first boss I implemented into the game, way back in 2020. His mechanical design has remained essentially unchanged since then, with mostly just small changes to health and damage, and a few visual updates. It was unclear to a lot of people that you could attack the bombs to disarm them, so we made the bombs look like little rat heads to make them seem more like an enemy you can kill instead of an inanimate object, along with tooltips and some other hints about that. With that fix, he feels like the perfect "first boss" now.



Radical Rat also had one problem that wasn't apparent when he was first designed- if it was raining when you reached him, his bombs would just get automatically defused by the rain the instant he threw them, and it was no longer a fight at all. He had no other way to damage you besides those bombs. So we gave him an alternate behavior where if it's raining he just chucks the bombs directly at your face instead! Take that!





Boris was the *second* boss I implemented into the game. His original design had him moving around trampling and dashing at you, and he would fart on you and dash away if you hit him from behind. He had a lot of HP but took extra damage if you attacked him from behind. This version of Boris was just... not fun. He was a big meat bag and there wasn't all that much decision making in his fight. There wasn't any easy way to dodge his attacks other than staying away from him, and all you had to do was just hit him till he died.



When it came time to put Boris in context as the boss of the Sewers, it was immediately clear that his design wasn't good, and that he would need to have a bit of a redesign. There was over a year between implementing him and actually having him placed into his spot in the sewers, so by the time I had to revisit him we had made a lot more enemies and bosses and content in between. As such the first step for this redesign was to just, cut all the mechanics off of him that we no longer used anywhere else in the game. So his "butt takes extra damage" effect is gone (no other enemies are "extra weak" to backstab like this), and his fart clouds are gone (the cloud layer ended up not being used because of visual overlapping issues). With those removed, his "dash forward when hit in the butt" effect didn't feel right anymore, as it was too easy to work around (just dont hit him in the butt at all), so that was cut.

With that stuff cut all that was left of the fight was just Boris moving towards you and occasionally dashing through your team. He needed *something else* to make the fight actually good. But there's an issue, he already had his animations made, and animations are the most time consuming part of development. So whenever possible, these redesigns need to use existing animations instead of requiring new ones (This more relevant for the later spoiler bosses that I can't show, who have quite insane animations, which makes tweaking and redesigning them quite interesting). Boris doesnt have any sort of melee attack or spit attack animations, he just has move and dash. So the thing I ended up doing was giving him a reaction that makes him move 1 space towards you whenever you damage him. Boris has Trample so he can run over you and your teammates as part of this reaction. And it didn't need any new animations!



The movement reaction really makes the fight into something great. It's an incredibly dynamic and fun fight now. Instead of being able to just beat on the meatbag until hes dead, now you have to consider positioning with *every* attack. You can use cheap weak attacks to bait him across the map away from your team, or stun him so melee attackers can get free hits in, or just tank his trample damage and hit him from up close, and you have to make sure he wont trample over your other cats when he moves towards you. Its crazy how such a small change turned Boris for a boring meat bag into one of the most fun fights in the game. He's remained mostly unchanged since then, aside from some balance number tweaks.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We've made a lot of bosses over the course of making this game, and one of the things we noticed was that if a boss is designed from its own perspective, meaning, the design is "what the boss does", it usually doesn't work well right away. "He jumps over here and then punches you and then does a cool mega attack", those kinds of designs work fine in an action game like The Binding of Isaac, but the bar for what makes a good fight in a tactical game like Mewgenics is a lot higher than that. Fights like that are not made from the correct perspective, and fixing them requires reorienting and designing from the player team's perspective instead. "OK to fight this guy you can do A, or B, or C, and have to consider X and Y when doing so" and making sure that the boss's abilities and skills are designed to foster those sorts of decision trees instead of just "looking cool and doing stuff".

A lot of our later bosses do just start out as "Looks cool, random bullshit go!". One particular one we had in place (which I can't show, because spoilers) was *so cool looking* that most of our beta testers reported it as a high point of the game when they first reached it. But the fight itself didn't quite live up to how cool the boss looked. It again just played out like a "Big Meatbag" fight. We're not content with visuals being the only cool part about a fight, so this was one we had to rework last month. It's an interesting challenge figuring out how to change a boss in a way that requires as few new animations as possible, and sometimes requires a whole day or two of brainstorming to really nail down what it needs. It's absolutely worth it though, and we've been able to fix every boss we needed to, often taking them into "this is one of the best fights in the game now" territory.

There's a few general classes of boss mechanics we have that often result in interesting tactical decisions on the player's part, and after having made ~50 bosses/minibosses so far we were able to pick out some of the things that differentiate the good ones from the ones that needed work. "Reactions" are a big category, Zodiac's "shoot anything that moves", Boris's "Move towards whoever damages you", and Chubs & Nubs' "spit-when-hit" are good examples of reactions that make for fun and interesting gameplay, and sometimes the way to fix a boss is just to give it some kind of interesting reaction to play around. "Multiple Targets" is another one, where simply having multiple different things to pay attention to and consider how to prioritize fighting can be fun, even if the individual targets are fairly basic. "Keep Away" is another one where the boss has a sub-goal they want to accomplish (like reaching a specific object on the map) and you have to consider how you can prevent or delay the boss from reaching that goal. There's a bunch of others, and combinations of these also work well. Maybe we can talk more about it all once the game is released and I don't have to avoid spoilers!!!



We have ~3 more bosses to animate, and I have 5 more bosses and 6 more minibosses to implement. Some of them (and some of the existing ones) will still need tweaks and adjustments.

Anyway here's a trailer update from Edmund:

As mentioned in previous posts due to the LA fires our trailer has been delayed slightly, Flynn is fine and working hard on polishing up the trailer as I type this! This teaser is a fun one, totally breaks all the rules of video game trailers but does feature a lot of gameplay footage in rapid succession so we have also spent the last week recording said footage and pruning it down to the most spicy bits!

here is a teeeeny tiny snipit of the trailer for your eyeballs!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The trailer will def be done by mid/late march but with GDC and april fools around the bend im not 100% sure if we will release it till our next update in april.

Stay tuned!

First a little status update

 - The Final boss is still on hold. I want to get all the existing bosses in and refined before I tackle this one so it feels like a true final boss.

- Zone 1 is fully balanced and refined (still need to pad out a few missing levels in the junkyard, though). Zone 2 is more than halfway there but definitely still needs more work to get it to where Zone 1 is. Zone 3 is not remotely balanced, but we will get there.

- We are starting the 3rd waves of testers soon, currently trying to fix all the issues we had in the 2nd wave... more on that below.

- Cutscenes have started! 2.5 are finished and I've storyboarded out the remaining ones.

- We are reworking the overworld map's visual progression currently. Sony-Shock is drawing up every biome in the game so we can push through them when you move to different chapters; it looks somewhat similar to the intro to The Simpsons or Adventure Time.

- Due to the LA fires, the trailer has been delayed a few more weeks. We are still hoping for a March release (for the trailer) but are unsure about when in March it will actually drop. 

- I've decided to revamp the classic Mewgenics comic for a possible reprint later this year. Not sure how it will release, but I definitely want to see it end up in some gift bags again at a con at some point...

Sony_Shock has remade the cover for it, which we might also be using on Steam. I've also commissioned Tom Bunk (of Garbage Pail Kids and Mad fame) to do a large 2-page centerpiece for it, so I'm pretty excited about how that goes. Check out Sony's cover remake!



This month will mostly be focused on polish, testing, and balancing, so let me break down exactly what each of those things means.



[h3]Polish:[/h3]
To me, polish is all the bonus extras that have nothing to do with gameplay; they are simply there to set a tone, punch up the visuals, or tell the game's story. Right now, that means cutscenes.



There are many cutscenes in the game, but most appear as introductions to house bosses and new areas. The one above is Guillotina's introduction, the first house boss. When a house boss appears, so does a countdown to when they will show up, so you can start prepping for the fight. On the final day, the sky will turn orange and the radio will only play a dramatic fight track to keep you pumped... but that felt a bit flat since you transitioned from this dynamic live broadcast to just a looping fight song, so we found a fun way to polish it up! Now, when you start the final day of the countdown, an emergency alert will play!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Was it required for the game to function? No. Does it really set a cool tone and pull things together more? Yes. This is what polish is all about!



[h3]Testing:[/h3]
We have had many testers over the last few months, mostly people we can trust—friends, family, and other devs.

A lot of devs actually hire testers or bring in fans; I avoid this and push towards average joes and devs. Why? Because testers and fans tend to either tell you more than you need to know or just tell you what they think you want to hear, and I personally don't rely on what a tester will tell me, but on what they don't. In all of our initial tests, we just watch—usually via Discord and sometimes in person. We loom ominously as testers struggle, watching as they make mistakes, skip text, and ask us questions that we never answer... THIS is how you test a game! You learn quickly what people genuinely miss, you see what makes them excited or feel smart, and you instantly realize when something you assumed was easy to understand is actually not clicking at all.

In the last month of testing, we noticed this.


This graphic is quite similar to Isaac's: testers who play up to 5 hours tend to stop there, while testers who test over 5 hours tend to snowball into the double digits very quickly. (Again, this is why it's good to test with IRL normal folk; if these were all testers, they would feel forced to play past the 5-hour mark and not playing wouldn't feel like an option at all.)

So why, why did a small group of testers just stop before the 5-hour mark and why is this mark so important? Well, we poked at those testers, as well as the ones who were continuously playing, and found that there was a very specific roadblock in the game for them—and this roadblock was Boris, the final boss of the Sewers (the 2nd chapter you unlock). But Boris wasn't all that hard; in fact, most testers ace him without issue, but these specific testers struggled here... there had to be a reason why. So we pulled aside a few of those testers and watched them play. After a few tests, it was clear what the issues were.

- They weren't reading or understanding the importance of their passive ability.

- They weren't reading the more wordy ability options when they level up and only choosing ones that sounded cool or were less wordy.

- The Sewers might have been a bit too hard for new players.

Your passive ability might be the most important ability your cats have; not only is it a bonus that's always active, but it's also designed to fit into an archetype, so if you didn't understand or know what your passive did, you'd never see draftable combos at all (another huge aspect of the game). So this is what we did.

In the game's tutorial, we now start one of the cats with an ability that kinda does nothing—it's a passive that magnifies burn. But when this cat levels up, we force there to always be the option to draft an ability that burns.





We even have Butch pop up and explain that there is a combo here with your passive and how important it is to check your passive so you can keep an eye out for combos like this.

We also moved the passive on the HUD right next to your level 1 abilities, in hopes players will mouse over or try to click on it and instantly realize what it does and why it's there.


I've also been doing a pass over all our basic abilities and cutting down their info text into one sentence, using icons and numbers as much as possible and removing any unneeded thematic fluff in hopes that people will be less intimidated by so many words so early.


And obviously, we nerfed the Sewers slightly and Boris got a bit of a nerf as well.

We haven't started the next wave of testing yet, but I think we nailed it. I'm sure more issues will pop up as we test, but I'm also sure we can address almost all the issues people have. Our goal is to make this VERY busy and complex game into something most can play and enjoy.



[h3]Balancing: [/h3]
Balancing a game revolves around tweaking and tuning numbers until they feel right and the game flows as smoothly as possible; this usually goes hand in hand with testing.

Like mentioned above, when we see testing stats that look odd or have multiple players messaging us that something feels unfun, it's our job to translate that into something that is fixable (if it turns out it needs fixing).

Something we learned last month as well was that people LOVE items—it shouldn't be that much of a surprise to Isaac fans... But in Mewgenics you have an item storage that you upgrade by sending retired cats to Butch. It was very apparent this didn't happen fast enough and having too small of storage early on felt unfun, especially when you bring back a hoard of cool items from a run and can only keep 4. We also saw from their saves that instead of upgrading storage, they decided to focus on upgrading their house. Upgrading your house feels like an essential, but the reality is, if you upgrade it too fast, too early, you end up in a situation where you can't manage your cats well enough.





To fix these issues, we simply started your storage at level 2—allowing for a very large inventory much sooner—and raised the cost to upgrade your house to slow house progression down a bit more. So far, these changes have made a world of difference... but not long after we changed them, we noticed another issue: everyone had nearly all the same items in their storage!

Now, the main issue here is that the general item pool is still missing 100+ items, but on that side I was personally having the same issues because it was very clear that some items were just better than others. Now, Mewgenics isn't Isaac; you don't start out empty when you do a new run—you have many items at your disposal, so if an item is clearly great, you will ALWAYS run it in your build... and that is boring. We also discovered that no one was keeping weapons; it was clear they were not considered valuable at all due to the fact that they had limited uses. In fact, most items that had limited uses were totally tossed at the end of a run.

So what to do? Well, the first thing I did was a pass over every weapon in the game and made all uncommon and rare items have infinite uses, but limited the medium power ones to once per turn and the very strong ones to once per battle. I also raised the number of uses for almost all common items as well. Then I went nerf crazy! My goal was to make sure all armor felt generally as useful as the others BUT pushed more into specific archetypes instead of general power. Anything that was very strong had an added downside, and most of the more basic strong items got pushed into specific but common and broad archetypes—agro, control, ranged, melee, spells, and summons.

Realistically, I'm barely scratching the surface when it comes to item balancing, and I'm sure both Tyler and I will do an all-nighter on every one of them in a few months and really balance the hell out of them.

But yeah, this is where we are at, and it feels very cool.

Fingers crossed the next update will feature a neato trailer! Till then, if you wanna support dev, please wishlist the game and share these posts!

xoxo
-Edmund