So a while back, we did a post on disorders. It's been so long I'll do a quick recap of what disorders are and how you acquire them.
Disorders are passive effects with major negative aspects but always feature a silver lining, some even have equal negative and positive aspects. Disorders can be acquired via events, combat, random strays, abilities, and even via birth and can't be removed by any normal means.
For ages, we only had a handful of disorders, rabies being the most noteworthy, and back then, rabies runs always ended in chaos and made for very interesting and tragic runs.
Rabies
(usually acquired via critically failing events)
Your attack becomes a melee attack, at the end of each combat you lose 1 intelligence but gain 1 strength, making you slowly stronger and dumber. Once your intelligence becomes 0, you become AI controlled and have madness (view your allies and neutral creatures also as enemies).
I have had some epic rabies runs where my rabies beast would go on to kill his whole team and continue on alone. I just watched as he destroyed hordes of enemies only to lose to the final boss of that chapter... tragic. But that isn't to say it always needs to end that way. I've had rabies runs where I started dumping items on the cat in question that buffed their int to keep them from losing their minds, or even simply killing the rabies cat off before he turned on his team, allowing the rest of my team to gain his level ups!
A few weeks ago, Tyler put his head down and started burning through our list of disorders with a goal to hit 100. In the middle of this, we started doing Twitter polls asking for feedback on what disorders people want to see in Mew. This quickly became, "Can you add my IRL disorder to the mix!?" and I totally get this. The first few disorders I designed for Mew were my own (ADHD and OCD), and I honestly thought the idea of "representation" was funny, cool, and a really neat challenge to design these disorders in respectful, funny, and smart ways...
So, as you might assume, we added autism to Mewgenics!
Autism
-2 Charisma, +2 Intelligence, the spells you are born with cost -2 mana (can't go lower than 1 mana) but all your other spells cost +1 mana.
Socially awkward but intelligent, very very good at one thing from the start but has a hard time with most everything else. (Note this design is actually based on what used to be referred to as Asperger's or high-functioning autism, now included in the autism spectrum.)
As assumed, autism is a disorder you are born with and can be passed down in the bloodline. We joked about having it also be given when giving cats booster shots but were worried people wouldn't realize it was a joke... :|
I'll spoil 2 more since both of these have been spoiled on Twitter...
Bad Gas
Start each combat with a mega fart queued up for the end of the round, at the start of your turn let her rip blasting everything in a considerable aoe backwards and dealing 10 damage to all hit.
Schizophrenia:
At the end of each of your turns, summon a random illusionary enemy with madness. The illusion takes its turn immediately and vanishes, attacking anything in its range.
Both of these disorders have a huge upside if you are able to play around them, having schizophrenia on a thief for example would allow you to hide behind the enemy frontline unleashing your illusionary horde upon them, or finding some kind of explosion combo to go off with bad gas (the fart counts as Explosion element, which has some synergies with things).
Ok... one more...
Triskaidekaphobia
Your spells cost no mana. When/if you cast your 13th spell (across all fights), you die, and your body is destroyed. (You gotta keep track of how many spells you cast on your own!)
This post has covered 4 of 100 current disorders in Mewgenics, and I have a feeling we might be adding more before release.
I look forward to finding out how best to use your autistic bloodline! Now let's close with a status update.
- Only 10 enemies and 9 bosses remain!
- All furniture is finished, including giving each one an alternate "shiny" version. More on this next month.
- All music tracks are finished, though Ridiculon will probably add a handful of jingles to cover transitions.
- Items are 1/4th finished (100s more to go, but 1/4th sounds better to me).
- Events are getting there. Our bonus programmer Graeme has been chipping away at them, and they are also about 1/4th of the way finished.
- NPC favor unlocks are all in, they just need finalized dialogue and polish.
- We have hired someone for our announcement trailer we hope to premiere in late Nov. / early Dec. ... exciting :)
It's getting close, dudes! Stay tuned and make sure to wishlist the game!
-Edmund