Happy winter, fellow mimics.
Hopefully everyone’s new year has been off to a positive start. We’re certainly excited about what the rest of 2024 has in store with January coming to a close. Though our release schedule may have shifted, we have not stopped any of our work on the game. Rather we have expanded our scope of what we want Mimicry to be, and have more accurately realized that it’s going to take us a while to finish the game.
In the past two months especially, we have reconceptualized many central mechanics of the game, as well as its identity. While observable progress has been slow, we want to make sure we take our time to really define what exactly Mimicry is. What this means for you is that we don’t have a lot of actual game to show you, but let’s still take a look at what’s being worked on.
- Graphical Redesign -
An aspect of the game we’d been wanting to redesign from the ground up for a while was the UI. The inventory is a staple UI page in gaming, and while the current design in Mimicry works, it’s overcomplicated and doesn’t feel very special. We want the in-game menus to feel substantial, interactable, and not break the immersion of the game. The end results may vary quite a bit from concept art, but they inform the feeling that we want, which allows us to work from there.
It’s important to us that the inventory and equipment pages felt similar to each other yet still distinct. The physical feel of the equipment page was even more important to us as we really want to have equipped items that feel intractable.
Respriting
Much of UI redesigning goes hand in hand with the reworking of all of the sprites and textures in the game. This is a process that is very long and complex, and a lot of our work is and will be drastic changes to existing behind the scenes functionality.
Because of how extensive these changes are going to be, and since they cover multiple topics, we’ll be saving a lot of this for the coming months. But speaking of topics to be discussed at a later point, let’s move onto something we promised in our last devlog.
- Classes -
While there is an existing playable mimic in Mimicry, it doesn’t have any defining characteristics other than “mimic.” Since this is something we want all classes to have, we like to consider the current player option as a base model to which we can add personality and specialization. Of the four total classes that will be in the game, we have two that we want to discuss today.
Lurker
Beginning with the sneakiest class, we have the Lurker. The Lurker focuses on stealth and mobility. Pick off enemies one by one while you use the secrets of the dungeon to your advantage. Strike from the shadows for greater damage, and slip away through passageways too small for enemies to pursue you through. While fully capable of engaging in head to head combat, the Lurker may not be the most fit option if combat escalates too quickly.
Bruiser
The Bruiser is a class that is rather well suited to facing off against large groups of enemies. It is a much tankier mimic that uses stealth for heavy surprise attacks rather than unseen infiltration. There is little need for this class to use the dungeon as its weapon when the Bruiser is the weapon of the dungeon. Crushing enemies may make tasks feel easy, but sometimes the best skill may still be knowing which fights to avoid.
Two More
There are still two classes yet to be properly announced. While we are very excited about what they are, and want to share them, they’re not quite ready yet. As such, they won’t be in the 0.3 update along with the Lurker and Bruiser. Don’t worry, they won’t be too far behind, and will show up in 0.4. We’ll discuss the future updates more down below.
Skill Tree
Even after the player chooses a class, all that is given are the tools to create a playstyle. Different playstyles are not even limited to different playthroughs of the game. Unlock different types of abilities, then mix and match to create loadouts for high combat or stealthy evasion situations.
There are three types of skills on the skill tree: roots, stems, and abilities. The three roots make up all of the abilities that can be unlocked, and each one: Jaws, Tongue, and Mimification, tell what all of its derived abilities will be. Specialize in Jaws to gain powerful bites and stunning roars, or use the mimic’s Tongue abilities to pull enemies towards you or crawl across the ceiling like a disgusting chest snail. Mimification contains the abilities that use mimicry, the strongest available to the mimic, such as weapon imitation and many more exciting feats.
Stems are unlocked just like abilities, but are not themselves a special ability. They connect several abilities under a sub group, sort of like a smaller version of a root. Since the stem doesn’t have any benefits inherently, unlocking it will let the player then immediately unlock one of its derivative abilities.
- Behind the Curtain -
Now for the stuff that we can’t make exciting with any pictures. Mimicry as it is right now is a great concept demo, but not a very good game. As mentioned at the beginning of the devlog, we’ve been spending a lot of time these past few months really reconceptualizing a lot of how we want the game to actually be played. This means a lot of work that isn’t really easy to share since it involves concepts and planning rather than anything that can be visually represented.
Level Design
It was a tough decision but one we felt another level redesign was necessary to fit the renewed vision of the game. On the technical side of things, the plan is to replace inefficient tilemaps with individual dungeon room textures and hitboxes. This means a big performance boost and increased variety in the dungeon itself.
The downside of this new process is that level design will take much longer, something we feel is worth a higher quality end result. Unfortunately, this also means that we will be focusing on smaller chunks of the dungeon at a time, so floor 3 will be shelved for a while. Additionally, in 0.3 only a portion of floor 2 will be accessible, though it will be substantially larger than the entirety of the floor currently. With any luck, by the next devlog we will have a lot of progress on this to share with you.
Mechanics
Though more abstract, the game mechanics have been another very important task for us to work on these past few months. Much of our work here is yet to leave the concept phase, but we have a lot of exciting ideas for how the different classes will use stealth and lure, how enemies will interact with the dungeon, ways to use parts of the dungeon for combat, how the dungeon will evolve and change the play experience as the game goes on, and so much more.
- The Future -
A lot has changed since the game first released almost a year ago. Not only have we changed a lot of what we want the game to be, but we’ve learned what it takes to actually achieve our goals in making this game. Because of this our timeline for releasing updates is very different now from what it was ten months ago, both in terms of how long each update will take to come out, and how many updates there will be.
Updates
As of now, 0.3 is planned to be released in late spring to early summer this year, and will be an infant version of what we want the final game to be, rather than a prototype of ideas. There is no time we could say with any accuracy that 0.4 would come out, but it will take the fledgling parts of 0.3 and realize them more fully, while also adding new parts of the game for players to explore.
Floor 1 will likely be added in part in 0.4, potentially, but not likely, along with parts of floor 3. Floors 3 and 4 will be added later along with other parts of the dungeon, new parts of the game to play, and more. The plan is still for Floors 5 and 6 to be released in the full release of the game, alongside that all important ending.
Important Information
Mimicry is an early access title because game development is new to us, and we want to take as much time as we can to make Mimicry a good game. To us that has always meant working with the community to see what is and isn’t working, and improve the game as it grows.
It’s important to remember that as of right now there are two people making everything for this game. We love working on this silly little game, but at the same time understand that making it good requires time and patience, and the latter is something that we also need to ask from you. We like to think that right now the game is a… roughly shaped piece of marble. With time, guidance from the community, and above all patience, we hope to refine that block into a crude sculpture, and then finally into a finished piece of art.
If you are interested in Mimicry or where it’s going, then please feel free to give any feedback you may have on the game. Anything from a single bug to an idea that you feel could really help the game, or something that just doesn’t work, all of it helps so much more than you realize. Some of our happiest moments developing this game was when people who had played it gave us their ideas or told us how broken the game is. If you have any bugs to report or any suggestions, head to the community discussions, or join our Discord server where we can more easily respond to you, as well as where we post smaller sneak peek updates and other news.
- See You Next Time! -
A much longer update than last time, but hopefully it’s exciting for you like it is for us. We’ll be hard at work next month cooking up more tangible progress that we can share with all of you. With that, we’ll thank you for taking the time to see what we’ve been up to these past months, and we’ll see you in the next devlog.
-Noah & Grayson