Mewgenics News

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

First, let’s get past the bad news: this post doesn’t contain a trailer. I had hoped the trailer would be ready by mid-January, and I was going to wait to post an update until then, but it’s looking like a March trailer release is more realistic. So, we’re just going to have to wait this one out.

I will post a few screenshots from the trailer (by Flynn) and say this: the trailer is more than a teaser. It’s an actual music video that also showcases a good 1.5 minutes of gameplay alongside a ton of live-action cats! Check it out!



So, where are we now? Honestly, even with a four-week delay due to back-to-back viruses flowing through our house and the holiday chaos, I feel like we are in a very, very good place currently.

• Only the final boss remains to be drawn, animated, and designed. Many other bosses still need to be fully implemented, but their animations, art, and designs are all ready to roll.
  
• The first half of the game's unlocks and rewards are completed.
  
• We are currently rebalancing a bit of Zone 1 and should be rebalancing Zone 2 by the end of January.
  
• We’ve added the second wave of testers to the team, and things are picking up. Quite a few of them already have 50+ hours logged.
  
• I’ve started working on NPC writing and the game’s story, alongside the beginnings of the game’s many small cutscenes.
  
• Oops... we added 90 more items to the to-do list. When completed, this will push the item count over 800, far surpassing Isaac’s numbers.
  

Now, I know what you’re thinking. What are you guys doing? Why are you adding more content? I thought you locked things down! Calm the fuck down and let me explain!

As we’ve gone over before, Mewgenics has three major zones. Each zone has a starting core chapter that branches into two paths, leading to a final chapter. That’s five chapters per zone (15 chapters total).

Each chapter of the game not only has its own set of special events, enemies, levels, and bosses, but it also has an exclusive pool of four armor sets. Once we started sorting items into their correct chapter specific item pools, we realized that most of the head, neck, and face items we had were part of these chapter-specific sets, and there wasn't a lot leftover in the general pool, resulting in testers getting a lot of the same hats over and over... so we designed 90 new items to be added to the shared pool raising the games total item number well over 800! (That's more than The Binding of Isaac!)

It’s been over a year since I talked in-depth about armor sets, so let’s go over them real quick.


Each cat can (usually) hold five items. In order, that’s:

1. Weapon - A (usually) usable item that you can attack with or activate to gain a specific effect, possibly with a limited number of uses.

2. Head Armor - An item you place on your head with a huge range of passive effects. This can be part of a set.

3. Neck Armor - An item you place around your neck with a huge range of passive effects. This can be part of a set.

4. Face Armor - An item you place over your face with a huge range of passive effects. This can be part of a set.

5. Trinket/Consumable - A trinket with a passive or activated effect, or a consumable item with an activated effect and a limited number of uses.

If an item is part of a set, that means if you collect and equip three items from the same set, you’ll get that set’s bonus. Set bonuses are hidden, so you won’t know what they are until you actually acquire them all. These bonuses range from basic to totally game-changing, depending on your setup.

Here’s an example of an interesting set:


Miner’s Hat - +2 Shield (2 Shield HP that always replenishes after combat). Your physical attacks can’t miss. Set: Miner.



Miner’s Mask - Immunity to Poison. Set: Miner.


Miner’s Bag - Your basic attack has +1 knockback (moves what it hits 1 tile away) and +1 knockback damage (if a unit is knocked back into something, it takes knockback damage). Set: Miner.


Miner Set Bonus! - +3 Luck, 2 bonus random pickups are spawned when you start combat (coins, food, catnip, etc.).


You may be thinking, “Oh, well, with 800+ items, there’s no way I’m going to find a full set of armor in a run...” Well, that’s probably true on average, but the thing is, you don’t need to find a full set in a single run.

See, the way Mewgenics works is that when you go on an adventure, the items you collect come back with you—so long as your cats aren’t killed. There are shortcuts home after each boss in each chapter. So, if you find two set items and really don’t want to risk losing them, just send your cats back home once you finish the chapter and store your items for safekeeping.

Back at home, you have a storage box. When you start out, your box is tiny—it can only hold four items. But simply donating a few skilled cats to Butch will greatly expand your box!



Don’t thank him. We don’t need him having a bigger ego than he already does...

Your personal house storage not only lets you collect item sets but also helps you plan your runs better. Heading into the desert? Why not bring a few water bottles? Going into the sewers to fight hordes of catsharks? Better bring some glass shards or broken bottles to cut up your enemies and cause a feeding frenzy, turning all the shark cats against one another! Or maybe you’re just going for that ultra-hard run you’ve never finished and see an amazing combo with a new kitten’s abilities. Your ever-growing box is legendary!

I’ll leave you with a few more random items to get your brains moving. Can you find interesting ways for these items to work in your favor?


Vibrating Meteorite - +3 to all stats. At the end of each combat, get -1 to all stats. *Cursed* (this can’t be removed).



Glowing Coin (Trinket) - Activate: 50% chance to double your mana, 50% chance to lose all your mana. (These odds are affected by your Luck bonus.)



Cactus Necklace (Neck Armor) - +2 Thorns (physical damage you take from anything deals 2 damage back). Brittle (when this cat is downed, this breaks). When this breaks, this cat gains +1 Con permanently. Set: Cactus.



Girder (Weapon) - Melee attack that deals high damage + knockback. What it hits has chain knockback (knockback that moves through what it hits). As long as this weapon hasn’t been used this combat, you have Brace 1 (reduce all damage taken by 1; can’t be reduced to 0). 3 uses.



Cambion Conception (Trinket) - Summon a half-sized dark version of yourself. It has 66% of your stats and all your abilities. It becomes AI-controlled (might be evil). 2 uses.

Today, I spoiled 8 of 800+ items in Mewgenics. I also spoiled 1 of 60+ item sets, let that sink in!

Anyway, see you next month! Wishlist the game on Steam and spread the word!

-Edmund

Current status update:

- Only 3 final bosses left to design/draw/animate and 5 enemies, and we have all the game's core content in.
- Teaser trailer is being filmed soon and should release after the new year.
- We have started internal testing on Steam (dev team and close friends/family only, sorry).
- Nearly all the game's items are in! (700+ when they are all finished)
- This month we are testing general early-mid gameplay flow and unlocks. So far, it's looking like it takes 8-10 hours just to get to the game's 1st (of many) house bosses. So even without replay/farming/leveling NPCs, the game's core game is looking very substantial.

Recently our wishlists have skyrocketed. That means a lot more eyes are on these posts as well as a lot more questions, the most common being: what does the gameplay loop look like for Mewgenics? So I'd like to do another recap of how the game plays and then answer some of the more common questions we get.

Mewgenics is a tactical RPG with a heavy focus on randomization and replayability. Not only is every run its own very unique experience, but the core of the game itself is also unique to each person. Let me attempt to explain.

Mewgenics starts here: your tiny house... on a hill... this is where your cats will multiply. In Mewgenics, not only are cats currency but they are also your life system!



When you have 4 cats, either via breeding or taking in strays, you can send them on an adventure to get food, items, money, and maybe extra appendages.



When your cats start an adventure, you class them. Each class comes with its own set of unique abilities taken from a pool of 75 abilities, as well as a unique attack and stat modification. You start the game with 4 classes: Fighter, Hunter, Mage, and Tank, but you unlock many more as you progress deeper into the game.



As your quest progresses, your cats will duke it out with a myriad of enemies. These combats are turn-based and utilize your cats' many abilities to destroy their combatants in many big-brain ways.



Each time you complete combat, one of your cats will level up, allowing you to draft more abilities from its class.



As you venture further from home, you stumble upon events that can completely change the trajectory of a run.



Or maybe even spawn a global weather event that completely changes the rules of the game... In Mewgenics, adaptation is vital!



Each chapter of the game concludes with a boss fight to test your cats' skills. Then you are left with a choice: to cut your losses and come home with your loot, or venture deeper into the unknown in search of more rare items, higher levels, and hoards of money and food.



When home, your cats are retired and left to spend their remaining days breeding... That is till your house is threatened by otherworldly monstrosities! That's when the skills of your old cats are put to the test. Will your dream team defend your home? Will you equip all your best items in an attempt to destroy the beast once and for all? Or will you just toss some kittens out there and hope it goes away... It's the choices that make Mewgenics unique.



Will you configure your house in a way that is very uncomfortable for the cats inside, causing riots where only the strong survive, or purely focus on drawing in skilled strays and ignore breeding altogether?



Will you forget you are low on food and your cats become cannibals?

Will you sell all your kittens to Tink so you can find out once and for all if your oldest cat is gay?

Will you breed autism throughout your bloodline and double down on its benefits?

Will you risk it all and take the spear of destiny down into the depths of hell?

Will the love triangle between Yoki, Anna, and Josh end in a murder-suicide?

Will you meet death, and escape?!

Will you find a way to make your brain worm work for you?

Will I ever find a short and concise way of explaining how this game works?

It's a mystery! It's all one giant mystery!

See you next year! -Edmund

--------------------------------

Bonus QA (feat. questions from Twitter)
Q: Are you confident the game will be stable at launch?
A: Yes, in the past I've had some rocky launches, but I can say with confidence that the launch will go as smoothly as The End Is Nigh's launch. Tyler is an extremely good programmer (easily the best I've ever worked with) with an extremely good work ethic. We are also taking our time and not rushing out a half-baked product, so I don't think you need to worry about this aspect of the launch at all.

Q: Will the game work on Steam Deck?
A: That is one of our goals. Adding controller support is a big hurdle, but we need to jump it to get the game on a console anyway, so yes, it's on our radar.

Q: Will Mewgenics feature cameos from our other games?
A: Yes, not only does Mewgenics take place in the Isaac/End Is Nigh/Bumbo/SMB universe, it will also feature tons of nods to nearly all of my previous games.

Q: Will each area have a boss or will there be boss pools?
A: Zones are broken into 5 chapters that split after the 1st. The first chapter of each zone features a pool of 4 mini-bosses and 2 final bosses, the 2nd chapters feature 2 mini-bosses and 1 boss, and the 3rd is 1 and 1.

Q: Is there going to be meta-progression in game? If so, how will it change the game?
A: Yes, the house hub is riddled with upgrades. Not only can you grow your house, inventory, and general storage for food/money/cats, but you can also level up NPCs by collecting and sending them specific types of cats. Doing so will level up their shops, unlock special items, and even aid in your runs. All aspects of these upgrades will aid in your general progress of the main game, making your bloodlines stronger.

Q: My question is about the replayability of this game: It will be more of a Hades where you have a main hub, in Mewgenics' case the house, that you will improve each run making the consequents easier? Or more of an Isaac approach of each run being isolated apart from new unlocks or floors?
A: It's somewhere in the middle of both. Meta progression will be more of a slow burn with Mewgenics compared to Hades, but much like Isaac, each run will have completion markers for each class that will unlock more items/abilities/content when completed. But Mewgenics also rewards general runs to grind for items/food/money to aid in meta progression. So kind of the best of both worlds.

Q: Will there be any public demo/beta version coming before release?
A: No, but Tyler and I plan on streaming the game monthly next year. Since Mew isn't a reflex-driven game, just seeing the game played gives you a very good idea of how it plays.

So as we speed towards the end of the year, October has been the month of unlocks! And Mewgenics has plenty. One of the most common questions we get these days is, "Will Mewgenics feature lots of unlockables like Isaac does?" The short answer is yes, the long answer is what this post is really all about, so let's jump in.

In Isaac each character had a post-it note that kept track of its unlocks and future goals. Mewgenics is very much the same, where each class has a "post-it note" with 15 goals. Completing each of these goals will unlock an item and give it to you, or unlock a passive/active for that class. We are tiptoeing around it but at this point it's kind of obvious that there will be more classes than the six we have spoiled, so if you add those secret classes to the mix you end up with a ton of unlockable content... but that's not all!



As we talked about before, NPCs will gain favor when you send them cats they like (Butch likes cats with fighting experience, Tink likes cute kittens, etc.). Each of the NPCs will also feature a varying array of unlocks to explore; some expand the number of items you can hold in your house, others give you special pieces of furniture... there are even some unlocks that allow you to break a few rules, you'll see what I mean later.



And finally unlockable quests, but to explain them I gotta go over something we touched briefly on in the past, house bosses.

[h3]: :: :: Spoiler :: :: :[/h3]

This is Guillotina, and she's going to consume your cats!



At a certain point in Mewgenics, Tina becomes aware of your activities and pays you a visit. Tina is the first "house boss" you will face, a very challenging test of skill that explores a whole new area of Mewgenics. See, house bosses are the only time you are allowed to reuse cats you have taken out on runs before. When Tina starts to make her way to your house you'll receive a warning, and a countdown that shows how many days left till she shows up will appear, allowing you to prep for the fight. Go out and level up a better team, farm some items to fill your storage, or breed some monstrous multiclassed amalgamations. Just be ready when she comes.



If you are able to fell this giant, you will be gifted a "quest item." These special items are eternal (can't be lost) and don't take up space in your storage. Each of these items will have a quest attached, a specific challenge to overcome that will yield unlocks that progress you through the game's "story".

And since we are spoiling Guillotina, might as well spoil one of the best songs on the Mewgenics OST!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

God I love that song... also, fun fact: all songs you hear during your quests will also be unlockable on your home radio!

The game has a lot of unlocks.

See you next month
-Edmund

Hello there kiddies! It's me again, a monthish older and a monthish closer to this game's release and my eventual demise! But before either of those things happen I should probably do a blog update explaining a MAJOR aspect of the game that we have glossed over for the last year or 2... furniture!



We have alluded to the fact that Mewgenics takes inspiration from Animal Crossing, and many of you asked how the hell that's possible... well, for one, there are currently over 700 unique pieces of furniture to decorate your ever-growing house with. These pieces range from large, sprawling bedframes to collections of rare bottles and taxidermy animals. I tried my best to make a range of flavors to allow players to express themselves as they wish... but as you might assume, most pieces lean towards the odd and mysterious.



"But what is the point in all this!?" you ask... Well, in the world of Mewgenics, each piece of furniture is special and imbued with special stat-boosting goodness!

[h3]Comfort:[/h3] The comfort level of your room affects the odds of your cats getting it on. Comfort also affects the general mood of the room, making aggressive cats more manageable... but keep in mind a crowded room or dirty room will also lower this stat. Comfort also raises the odds of cats birthing multiple kittens.

[h3]Stimulation:[/h3] Affects how well your kittens inherit the higher stats of their parents as well as any mutations they may have. Stim also affects the odds of a kitten inheriting a classed ability from one of its parents... the key to multiclassing in Mewgenics.

[h3]Appeal: [/h3] Appeal affects the overall appeal of your house as a whole. A high appeal house will raise the odds of stronger strays with special inborn active and passive abilities to appear more often.

Now let's look at a few examples of how these stats appear in set pieces.

[h3]Microwave: +1 Comfort[/h3]

[h3]Toxic Waste Barrel: +4 Stimulation, -2 Comfort[/h3]

[h3]Touched Toxic Waste Barrel: +8 Stimulation, -4 Comfort[/h3]

Oh wait, what was that... Why, that last piece of furniture looks a lot like the one before it... and its stats are all wackadoo!? Well, that's because all 700+ pieces also have a rare alt version with boosted stats and a unique and usually animated or spiced-up look!

You can find random pieces of furniture on your many adventures, but the best way to start your hoarding is to visit Jack's Shack.



Jack starts out selling 2 items every week, refreshing his shop on Sundays, so be sure to check his shop often. Jack also collects cats with injuries (he feels kinship with them), so sending him your injured masses will level up his shop over time.



The furniture aspect of Mew was a hard nut to crack, so we didn't want to force its design. We had originally assumed each piece would have unique stats and effects that would have a small % chance of affecting cats born in the room with them... but this was not only a ton of work (1400 unique designs) but also it became obvious that making specific pieces with specific stats would mean there would be an ideal number of set pieces to place in your main rooms and everyone's house would end up looking the same. I really wanted people to have some creative freedom with how their houses looked, so using a more generalized stat setup felt not only more elegant and less work but also would allow you to express yourself!

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General updates:

Our goal of having a content-complete build by New Year's is looking very good. I'm currently finishing up the 3-4 "final bosses" art-wise as our animators churn out the remaining enemies/bosses. Outside of the game dev side, we have commissioned a filmmaker to start working on a little teaser trailer for the game's "rerelease press push" late this year that I'm quite excited about, and we hope to start testing the game on Steam with friends and devs. Once the trailer launches, I hope to replace these monthly blog posts with "let's play" gameplay videos of the early game chapters so you can get a real feel of how everything works.

See you next month! -Edmund