Mewgenics News

This is your starter house, a simple but effective single-room house with enough room for your little cat hoard. "But how does this house actually play into all this turn-based adventure stuff you've been selling us for the past year?" you ask. Well, that's what I'm here to explain, silly!

When you start Mewgenics, you will select your starter cat from Dr. Beanies and bring him/her back to your little shack to care for. Caring for a cat in Mewgenics starts simple; a cat needs food, shelter, companionship and a cat needs to be cleaned up after. Let's go over each of these real quick.

[h3]Food:[/h3]
Each time you pass the day in Mewgenics, each cat currently inside your house will consume one food from your supply. If it can't, it will start to starve and eventually die. There are many ways to gain food in Mewgenics but the most effective way to do it is to go on an adventure.



You can go on an adventure by placing 4 cats into the "adventure box" and departing. This will then allow you to class your cats, equip any weapons or armor you may have found around town or in previous adventures, and finally depart on your quest to find food, money, glory, and possibly even love!



The further you go in your quest, the more food you acquire. The harder the path you take, the more food you will find! Once you finish your quest, or find a shortcut home and decide your team has had enough, you'll return home with the food, money, and a few items you may have acquired. Everything you have will be placed in your house inventory.

[h3]Shelter:[/h3]
Not only does your house protect your cats from the elements, but it also protects your extremely valuable pieces of furniture you'll hoard as the game progresses. Having stuff for your cats to interact with, sleep on, and stare blankly at for hours not only raises the happiness of your cat family but also has magical effects on them and even the world! But I'll hold that info for another blog post.



[h3]Companionship:[/h3]
Each time you pass the day in Mewgenics, a stray cat will wander closer to your house and wait, crying outside for you to let them in. This will not only allow you to snatch up more heroes for your future adventures but will also allow you to offer companionship to your current cat family. Passing the day in the house hub will roll a few dice for you behind the scenes to figure out how well your current household gets along. It will also let you know if any of the cats "got busy" and if getting busy was successful enough to yield a kitten. Kittens are yet another way to make progress in Mewgenics, and we will talk in-depth about that in a future post.



[h3]Clean up:[/h3]
Cats poop, and cleaning up after them is important. You don't want your starving cats eating poop for dinner... or do you? Clean-up is simple; click the poop you want to remove and poof, it's gone! And hey, you may get lucky and discover something valuable your cat had eaten without you realizing it!

And those are the basics of the house hub in Mewgenics. The house is currently still very much a work in progress but even in its bare bones form, it's been a huge game changer.

Just for shits and giggles, here's a side-by-side comparison of the original flash prototype of Mewgenics from 2013 compared to now.



I love this game,
-Edmund

This week, we are gonna talk about pickups!

Pickups are collectable objects you can find scattered around combat maps. They can also spawn from specific objects as well, but let's go over the basic pickups real quick. Pickups are collected when you end movement on top of them.


[h3]Food:[/h3]
Regains you a number of hit points depending on the size of the food.


[h3]Scrap:[/h3] Gains a number of armor depending on the size of the scrap. (Armor acts like hp that is always removed first when hit; armor only lasts till the end of combat.)


[h3]Catnip:[/h3]
Gains mana depending on its size.


[h3]Coins:[/h3] Gains you coins equal to the number of coins seen on the tile. (Coins are used as a resource during your adventure as well as when you are back home.)

[h3]Misc:[/h3] There are a few other rare pickups as well, but I won't spoil them now.

Pickups are usually randomly spawned when you start combat, but you can also find them inside trash bags, crates, and even dead bodies!



Pickups are a fun bonus to each combat, so fun in fact that a few classes can actually interact with them in very unique ways. Observe!

"Swift Looter" is a fun thief ability that allows the thief to gain a bonus movement when they pick up a coin!



But wait, there is more. This combos very well with many other thief abilities, a great example being "Coin Toss". Imagine the possibilities!



In another example, we see our cleric with a passive called "Sharing is Caring", an ability that gives whatever this cat picks up to ALL other allies!



And in my final example, I'll have my mage throw a fire blast onto a food pickup and... wait, what's this... COOKED FOOD!??



Till next time,
-Edmund


FAQ time!

Q: Is Mewgenics technically a musical?
A: Honestly, I've been asked this and told this often enough to consider it. Mewgenics might be considered a musical.

Q: Can we pet the cats?
A: We are working on it, currently you can scruff them.

Q: How long will a run take?
A: We are currently looking at 90-minute runs, but it really depends on how much you min-max and think obsessively about each choice. Runs each take 3 chapters, so you can divide them up into 30 minute chunks if you want more bite-sized play sessions.

Q: Will you release on console?
A: It won't launch on console but yes, I assume it will release on at least one console eventually.

Q: How much will it cost?
A: We don't have a nailed-down price yet, but it will likely be somewhere in the $20-$30 range.

Q: Is there going to be PVP?
A: This isn't something we have looked into at all yet. Not sure the game would complement itself well to that, but that doesn't mean we won't at least explore the idea later and see.

Q: How long of a game is it?
A: Mewgenics is a roguelike that is designed to be replayed for hundreds of hours. It's hard to say how long it will take to 100% right now, but it's looking like "Rebirth" size in terms of how much effort it will take to 100% it.

Q: Will there be dogs?
A: Yes, but they won't have heads.

Hey all, Tyler here! I'm the programmer and other designer of Mewgenics. And I'm here to talk about... BUGS!



not those kinds of bugs

One common question we get asked when talking about just how much stuff is in mewgenics, how do you make sure it all works? I mean, there's *thousands* of things in the game, and that means *millions* of ways those things can interact (and even more when counting 3 piece or 4 piece combos). It's pretty much impossible to test all possible interactions. Well, for humans to test them at least...

Enter the Fuzz Tester



The fuzz tester automatically plays the game, as fast as the computer can possibly run it. As you can see, its doing a couple of full fights per second. A human will normally take a couple of minutes to play through a combat encounter, so this means the computer can play about 500x faster than a human. It also doesn't need to sleep, so I can just run it overnight and come back the next morning to 100000 combat encounters played, each with a completely new set of cats with different abilities, afflictions, items, and mutations. That's a lot of interactions tested, for just one day!

In fact, I am running the fuzz tester while writing this post right now! And... oh no! It crashed!



After a bit of digging around in the debugger and log files, I found the culprit!



You see this little bird? Well its a rare spawn that can randomly show up in levels. They run away quickly, but if you kill it before it flies away you get some good rewards! Now this little bird here in particular... it was killed by a lightning strike from a rare weather effect, not a cat or an enemy! When it tried to grant its rewards to its killer... it didn't actually have a killer so the game crashed.

An easy enough thing to fix, and a quick double check that that same issue was not happening on a handful of other similar effects, and now... roast bird for everyone!



Lets take a moment to appreciate just how rare this particular interaction was. Birds are a rare spawn, lightning is a rare weather effect, and a lightning strike hitting and killing a bird before it runs away is... well... rare. You could play this game for 1000 hours and never see that happen. And yet the fuzz tester found it in a few minutes. It's an extremely powerful tool, and will be a large part of ensuring a stable launch. It can't find *everything*, but it covers a lot of space, and we're still doing traditional testing as well to cover the rest.

Until next time
- Tyler

So, one very neat aspect of Mewgenics that probably won't be instantly noticed by players is the game's elemental effects. What are elemental effects, you might ask? Well, let me show you...

This is grass.



This is what happens when you add water element to grass.



And this is what happens when you add ice element to the same grass.



And this is what happens when you add fire element to it.



And this is what happens when you add ice element back into the mix.



Now let's set a grassy field on fire!



And let time pass...



This is fine.

Mewgenics features all the common elements you'd expect.

[h3]

• Fire
  
• Ice
  
• Water
  
• Grass
  
• Earth
  
• Lightning
  
• Wind
  

[/h3]

But also quite a few oddball ones that I won't spoil just yet...

Each of these elements will affect one another as you would assume and also affect MANY other things in very interesting ways, including monsters, pickups, and objects lying around you!

Experimentation is key when it comes to Mewgenics!

BURN IT DOWN!

See you soon,
-Edmund

So, as you may have noticed, Mewgenics has a lot of music... A LOT of music, amazing music that will cream everyone's pants, all around the world! However, not all music is used as you might assume.

Most of the music we have posted is for the adventure. Each chapter of the game has its own unique track and each submenu (map, event, and combat) has an alternative take that we crossfade between.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The adventure tracks we have shown that feature lyrics are boss tracks. They only play during the final fight for each chapter.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

But, not all songs we have previewed are adventure tracks. Some of them have been house tracks.

House tracks are songs that play during the home hub portion of the game. This is where you'll be tending to and breeding your cats. It's also the place where you will hoard furniture and upgrade the game's many core mechanics.

While you are in house mode, a radio station will play, hosted by a very familiar voice... These radio bumpers are plentiful and randomly selected during play to create the illusion of a living radio station... and it works oh so well.

Here is a final version of an old teased track but with some radio bumpers by Matthias Bossi of Ridiculon.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Currently, 20 house tracks are finished, but I assume a few more will be added by the end of development. I'm telling you, this OST is a HUGE banger!

On a side note, as of June 1st, we will have 12-15 months of dev time left in Mewgenics in order to hit our release goal of summer of 2024. Currently, we are on track, but these long-winded blog posts are definitely cutting a full day of dev time out of my week. So, from this point on, I'm going to keep updates a bit more bite-sized for the next 6 months.

Stay tuned!
-Edmund