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.
Polish:
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!
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!
Testing:
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.
Balancing:
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