Mewgenics News

[h3]“After a very small and fun sample of what's apparently a 200-hour game, I'm inclined to trust McMillen's judgment when he says that Mewgenics is his best yet.“ -PC Gamer[/h3][p][/p][p]SEE! I TOLD YOU! Go check out this PC Gamer Preview now![/p][p][/p][p](Fun fact: Tyler only has 3 fingers on his right hand apparently.)[/p][p]The PC Gamer article touched a bit on IRL disorders that we are bringing into the game, and autism was a big one that people seemed to love seeing represented. But the article also touched on dyslexia as well.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]By far the most common disorder we get asked about is ADHD, one everyone in my household is VERY familiar with... it took a bit to get the perfect design for it and it's just too fun not to share.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Faster, smarter, very easily distracted... here is a little video of ADHD in action![/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Don't worry, we will add your disorder by the end of dev![/p][p][/p][h2]DEV BLOG UPDATE![/h2][p]The game releases Feb 10th, that means roughly 6 more months of dev![/p][p][/p][p]- The final boss of the game is fully animated and being implemented this week. All other bosses are done, but 5 bosses still need to be balanced and polished.[/p][p][/p][p]- All the game's NPC dialogue is complete but still needs to be edited.[/p][p][/p][p]- All the game's ability tooltips are complete and half edited; we still need to do a pass over items once they are all in.[/p][p][/p][p]- There are 6 to 8 more cutscenes to animate (depending on how the timeline is looking), but the majority are finished, scored, and ready to roll![/p][p][/p][p]What have we been focusing on this month?[/p][p][/p][h2]Item Rarity![/h2][p][/p][p]In testing, we noticed people struggling with what items to keep or toss when their inventory was full after returning home from an adventure. We also noticed our current rarity icons made no sense to people and were too subtle, so this month we fixed that.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Now I think rarity is obvious, but I’ll break it down for ya.[/p][p][/p][p]No icon – Common[/p][p]Grey circle – Uncommon[/p][p]Yellow diamond – Rare[/p][p]Red triangle – Very rare[/p][p][/p][p]There are also icons for other item types.[/p][p][/p][p]Blue square – Story items[/p][p]Green square – Quest items[/p][p]Purple splat – Cursed items[/p][p][/p][p]Also, for those wondering, the tiny icons at the top of each item inform the player on what item slot this will fit into.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Sword – Weapon[/p][p]Hat – Head Armor[/p][p]Necklace – Neck Armor[/p][p]Glasses – Face Armor[/p][p]Flask/Ring – Consumable / Trinket (these occupy the same slot)[/p][p][/p][p]Once we locked in the new rarity system, we realized that the pools were unbalanced and we needed 30 or so more common items...[/p][p]So we added those. I won’t say what the exact item count is right now... but I will say at this point it’s bigger than the current number of items in Isaac.[/p][p][/p][p]The next big milestone for us is Halloween. Our goal is to have all the game's text finished by then so we can start localization Nov. 1st. That means all items, events, NPC text, abilities, etc. need to be 100% done, edited, and ready to roll by then. So basically, content complete for everything that involves text.[/p][p]After that, we will just be polishing, tuning, adding cutscenes, and coming up with ways to push this game to people while the localization folks do their thing.[/p][p]Oh, speaking of pushing the game to people, check this out: The Mewgenics comic version 2.0![/p][p][/p][p](Full front and back cover by the amazing Sony_Shock!)[/p][p][/p][p]So for those out of the loop: 13 years ago I started working on a prototype for this game, and I loved the vibe so much I decided to make a comic about it (well, a comic/activity book hybrid anyway). We handed them out at PAX that year, and then the game was canceled alongside another project of mine, Camdrome (that also premiered that year at PAX). Shortly after the canning of the projects, my soul left my body, and a few years later my body followed it, leaving Team Meat and taking my IPs with me.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]But I LOVED this comic. And what's more fun than promoting your dream project with an art project? So, 2 months ago I remade the old comic, now in full color and with tons of special guest artists like Jhonen Vasquez (Invader Zim), Tom Bunk (Garbage Pail Kids and MAD), Rich Werner (Plants vs. Zombies), Alex Pardee, and a few others I’ll keep secret. It was a lot of fun to make.[/p][p]We will be giving them away at the cons we demo Four Souls at later this year and sending them to the press (hit me up on Twitter!). But for those who can’t make it to cons, we will also be selling the press pack to fans. It comes with a ton of cool shit. More details later this year. But if you happen to somehow be at Gen Con right now as I type this, YOU CAN GET THE COMIC TODAY AT BOOTH 1109! (With purchase.)[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Sept. is the month we start gameplay videos! So stay tuned for that. But till then, I leave you with a little Q&A with questions from my Twitter followers.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Do you plan on every Mewgenics run being winnable if you play well enough, or will there be some unavoidable run-enders if you're super unlucky?[/p][p]A: I put the RNG of Mew on par with Isaac. You can get unlucky and bad things can happen in events, but never enough to totally throw a run. We try and make sure anything really bad that could be so debilitating you lose a run is tied to a choice you make.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Would there be Mewgenics cards for Four Souls sometime after release?[/p][p]A: Yes! We are actually making a promo pack for the merch drop mentioned above![/p][p][/p][p]Q: How many mutations can a cat accumulate?[/p][p]A: There are 9 core body parts that can be mutated, so usually the most you may see is 9. But there are very rare cases of asymmetry, so it is possible to have 15 mutations at max. I personally haven't had more than 6 or 7 mutations on a cat at one time.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Will the game have multiple save files and a cool thing for 100% all of them like Isaac?[/p][p]A: There will be 3 saves, like Isaac. We currently don’t have anything cool for 100% on all of them. It takes 200 hours to beat the game’s story, so we have a while before anyone does all 3 ;).[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Will the pathing be similar to Isaac where you can take different paths in order to fight different bosses like the Beast and Mother fights?[/p][p]A: Yes, each zone splits and ends with a unique final boss. Beating said boss will get you a “check mark on your Post-it note” for each class that has beaten said final boss. Unlocks are given out similarly to Isaac, but in Mewgenics, when you unlock an item, it gives you the item then.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Just how replayable IS the game—does every run feel more or less unique than it can in The Binding of Isaac?[/p][p]A: The game is designed to be replayed and is far more infinite in terms of unique runs compared to Isaac. Example: Isaac features 700 items and each run you gain a small number of these at random. Mewgenics also features 700+ items, but the main focus of each run isn’t these items, it’s the abilities you draft. Mew features totally unique abilities and each one of these has an upgraded version. Just based on those numbers, you can see how much more unique each run can actually get. But shit gets really bonkers when you factor in multiclassing abilities via breeding and saving items for future runs. It gets into this really neat always-different, yet you-have-some-control-over-the-starting-build system that feels pretty unique. I have 165 hours in my current save and I'm discovering new combos in literally almost every run I do.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Will the cats be gay?[/p][p]A: One of the many behind-the-scenes stats of each cat is “Gay Factor.” When a Gay Factor is mid, the cat will be categorized as bisexual, and when it’s high, it will be flagged as gay. But you won’t know this till you unlock Gaydar. Well, you’ll have an idea by what your cats do at night, but it won’t be spelled out for you till Gaydar is unlocked.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Wait, so straight cats might have gay sex?![/p][p]A: Two other stats we track are libido and charisma. So it’s theoretically possible for a totally straight cat that is extremely horny to be charmed by an extremely charismatic gay cat. Hell, if you lock two straight cats in a room that are both horned up and high charisma, with enough time, you never know what will happen.[/p][p][/p][p]Q: Wait... am I gay?[/p][p]A: Yes.[/p][p][/p][p]See you next month![/p][p]-Edmund[/p]

It won't surprise anyone who's followed his career that the next game from Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen contains some likely-to-be-controversial elements. Its title is Mewgenics, a play on "eugenics," so there's one right off the bat...
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Isn't it a bit messed up that we selectively breed cats and dogs into asthmatic oddballs and then sell them to each other? I love cats, but, yeah, it is a bit messed up. That's basically what inspired Mewgenics, a game about breeding cats and sending them on adventures with turn-based combat. (So they're outdoor cats.)..
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[p]Hey all! Tyler here! I'm taking over the blog post this week to talk a little bit about...

INBREEDING
So, in a game about breeding cats, we knew pretty early on that being able to simulate inbreeding and birth defects associated with that was going to be important. After all, its kinda what we've done to cats and dogs in real life already, both accidentally AND on purpose. [/p][p][/p][p]none of this is natural

Gameplay wise, if you have 2 identical cats, and breed them together, you would get a nearly identical kitten. If there is no penalty to inbreeding, you could then play the game with 4 copies of the same cat, forever. Over and over. Which is pretty antithetical to the "infinite different cats!" theme of the game. So the downside to that is birth defects tied to inbreeding. If you breed cats that are too closely related to each other, they have a chance of getting an inbred birth defect, which have negative effects tied to them.

Though, rarely, some of these inbred mutations have upsides attached to them as well[/p][p] [/p][p]Anyway its pretty fun making a bloodline of cats that rivals or surpasses even the most inbred European royal families. Take a look at this family tree!

And yes, you can view these family trees in game... when you unlock them. ===== Anyway so, how do I actually compute "how inbred a cat is"? The initial thought is to just detect if the parents are related, and how related are they (how far back you have to check to find a common ancestor). But it turns out, if the family tree looks more like a spiderweb, even that is not super clearly defined. A cat can be an uncle brother or a grandma cousin or any number of relations that don't even have names. So I had to do *research* to figure out how to compute this.[/p][p][/p][p]My first thought is to just check what other games do. And well, it's not exactly a common thing for games to do. Not even dwarf fortress bothers with it. Well, there is one game series that does handle it at least, and that would be Crusader Kings. Since I've never played any of them, I just looked up on their wiki how they handle inbreeding, and learned that they use a fairly simple estimation where they just look back 5 generations and count how many unique ancestors there are. If characters are not related, there should be 32 unique ancestors, and that number shrinks rapidly if there was any inbreeding. [/p][p][/p][p]While I'm sure that works fine for crusader kings, and would *probably* be fine here as well, the fact that it was just an estimation that can't look back further than 5 generations didn't *feel right* to me and made me wonder like, there has to be some actual scientific research here right? Like how is this stuff computed in the real world and what contexts would that even show up in? Turns out, that context is dog breeding. This page was one of the first ones I stumbled on and gives a brief overview of what a "Coefficient of Inbreeding" (COI) is, and how that can be inaccurate if you don't check enough generations backward, along with some metrics for what an "acceptable" and "unacceptable" level of inbreeding is for dogs before there starts to be negative effects. This page is missing the actual math or algorithm to compute the COI, but since it had an actual term, I had a thing I could google for now.[/p][p][/p][p]I eventually stumbled upon this paper (which was not access restricted back when I was doing this initial research, but luckily I did download it before it locked) which had a recursive definition of how to compute the COI (also known as Coefficient of Kinship, or just Kinship):

For some reason academic papers love making formulas look overly complicated with greek symbols and junk everywhere, but its a fairly simple recursive definition that translates directly into just a couple of lines of code. To make this efficient for huge populations (like dog breeding pools), the trick they use is to cache the kinship between every possible pair of living dogs, and once a dog dies they no longer need their kinship relationships to be stored anymore and can be dropped from the database. So the cache stores N^2 values where N is the number of *living* dogs at any given time, and yet this algorithm remains accurate for as many generations backwards as there was data for. No compromises needed!

For mew since you're unlikely to ever have more than 100 or so cats at a given time, this means I can track kinship by storing ~10k values at most in the game's save file, which is a relatively small amount, and notably does not arbitrarily increase over time as you play for hundreds or thousands of hours. Someone can churn through a million cats, no problem, the inbreeding calculation will remain accurate and is fast enough to compute in real time. Is it all necessary? Would an easier, less accurate simulation have had basically the same effect? Maybe. But I do think its funny to say that Mewgenics has the most scientifically accurate inbreeding simulation of any game ever. I'm not one to half ass something if I can full ass it instead!

Anyway I now know way too much about inbreeding.[/p]

The "endless cat breeding RPG" Mewgenics showed up at the PC Gaming Show yesterday with another bizarre trailer and a new release date: Instead of arriving in 2025 as planned, it's now set to arrive on February 10, 2026. And there's actually a pretty good reason for the delay...
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