Alright, folks, so full disclosure, at this point in the dev blog saga, we assumed we would be showing in-game footage and pushing towards a trailer reveal, but due to unforeseen circumstances, we have lost about 5-6 months of dev over the last 2 years and aren't ready to start pushing in-game footage nor do we have a trailer ready. So! From here on out, we will be doing some actual dev blog updates, NO HYPE! Just realistic behind-the-scenes info on where we are at, what we are doing, and where we are going. So, let's start by going over where we are.
Don’t obsess over these % numbers, I'm trying to factor in a bunch of things to find those numbers... also, I’m bad with numbers.
Enemies (85%)
We are on the homestretch with enemies right now, all but 5-8 enemies are 100% artwise, about 25 still need to be animated, and about 36 need to be implemented (out of about 200).
Bosses (70%)
This will be the biggest hill to climb over the next 8 months. Bosses are large and take lots of art/animation and programming. Defeating each with different classes yields unlocks, so they all need to feel unique, challenging, and cool.
Environments (85%)
Art for all the game's chapters has been done for a while now, the few remaining areas just need to be painted and implemented alongside any special mechanics for that chapter.
Items (20%)
OK, so this number looks low, BUT! that's only because we have kind of been sitting on items for a while waiting for the perfect person to show up... and that person is showing up May 1st! That’s right, Vinh is coming along for the remaining ride! For those of you who don’t know him, Vinh was the lead programmer for Isaac: Repentance and creator of the Antibirth mod. He has come to bless us with his obsessive attention to detail and amazing brain! On my end, about 80% of all the item art is complete, it just needs to be implemented.
Events (45%)
Another content barrier we are going to be chewing on for the remaining months. I have the art for about 90% of the events finished, but implementing them does take some time since there are so many different outcomes to them. Vinh will also be helping with this aspect of game dev as well.
Music (98%)
This would be 100% but since they finished ages ago, we recently commissioned a few more tracks for some special events in the game, so basically, music is done but they are on call in case we need anything during the remaining months of dev.
House Hub (80%)
The house hub is still missing the house upgrades alongside a few house events and some UI polish but it's very close.
Furniture (75%)
So this aspect of the game is one of two elements that I’ve avoided talking about in-depth because there are aspects of them that we still don’t have nailed down in-game. For furniture, all of it has been drawn and added to the game, but the actual properties of them have not been defined yet. There are a few aspects of these properties we still need to make sure work and function in a way that complements how the game plays now, and not how we assumed it would play. Knowing how much the game was changing as we worked on it, I thought it was important to keep these properties undefined... so they remain that way currently, and once they are defined I’ll do a post about them :)
NPC's (20%)
Another aspect of the game that has been held for the end of dev so we can complement what the game has become over the years. The visuals, animations, and dialogue programming stuff is basically ready for these guys, but the specifics of what they will say, challenges they will offer, and any possible dialogue tree type elements are still undefined and will probably remain that way till later this year.
Abilities (100%)
The biggest, most fun, and honestly most important aspect of development, currently Mewgenics has over 1000 unique abilities across its many classes. To speak in hip indie game analogy, abilities are basically "cards" you draft into your deck of cats! Each class has many unique archetypes you can draft into as you level them up and many archetypes also have interplay between different classes. Take into account your ability to multi-class and the fact that all 1000+ of these abilities can also be leveled up to gain boosted or even totally new effects makes this horde of content nearly infinitely replayable.
To segue off into a tangent real quick, let me show you what I’ve been working on this last week.
Ability icons!
Originally just had the names of each ability on their button.. but that just looked ugly, so I decided to draw icons for all of them! I wanted to come up with a simple visual style that could easily convey to the player roughly what each ability would do and tried my best to reuse as many established iconography as possible.
Let's play a little game real quick, I’ll show you some icons and you guess what they do!
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Wasn't that fun!? Not as fun as drawing 1000+ icons I bet! Eh honestly, drawing these icons was fun, it was coming up with unique titles that was difficult... I don’t envy Wizards of the Coast.
Anyway, post what you think each of these icons does, and next blog update I'll post the answers and we can see how miserably I failed as a visual designer.
Back to work! See you next time.
-Edmund