User blog:Becer/Its Caturday, time to talk about hoarding!

At some point in development you come to a crossroads, at this juncture you take a look at your game, what you have planned and say... is this enough?

at the 1 year point with super meat boy it was the number of levels, we had planned on around 150 levels... a much smaller experience, but at that crossroads we both decided in order for meat boy to have the impact we wanted we needed to go much further and commit to a much bigger game, which meant doubling the number of levels. with mewgenics that time came about 2 months ago.

the mewgenics development experience has been odd to say the least, we have tons of different simulations running but not everything is fully connected yet, we know what we want but aren't sure how far we can take it and when enough is enough.. mewgenics is a feature creep, an endless amount of little additions that all stack up... in a lot of ways mewgenics is "feature creep" the game. usually you try to avoid this in development, but with a game like this one.. it somehow feels appropriate.

so 2 months ago we committed to the addition of "furniture".



Baby jack runs the "hoarders R us" store in mewgenics, selling his nona's "collections" in order to remove her from the self imposed tomb she currently resides in just beyond the stores wall. Most know this design from animal crossing, you collect items to fill your house, it's basically the core of what animal crossing is. but with mewgenics we wanted to make this collecting/hoarding aspect more meaningful, we wanted it to go beyond basic hoarding for hoardings sake and into something that impacted gameplay, and this is basically how it works.



almost every item in mewgenics has some type of special property depending on what the item is. Clocks manipulate time, healthy food raises hp and your cats hunger threshold, spoiled food or trash raises the chance of strays visiting your house, microwaves and other radioactive items raise mutation chances, evil items raise aggression and sometimes damage. the number of things your furniture can effect is amazingly high, from all the cats stats, disease rates, money you start with, money you gain, life span, libido, fertility, mail rate, store discounts, room in your house... the list goes on.



the items you collect and choose to place in your house not only affect stats and % of basically every aspect of the game, but they also affect your cats identity (but we will save that for next week).

there are 5 types of furniture:

Sets (10 items in a set) Large ( large stable items that other things can be placed on, shelves, stoves, giant stone heads...) Med ( smaller than large items but basically the same, totems, aquariums, taxidermy, piles of books...) Small ( very small items that cats can interact with and can be knocked over, candles, pill bottles, bobble heads, indie game plush...) Wall ( items that can be placed on the walls and in the background that stick where you put them, posters, paintings, mylar balloons, black holes...)



there are currently 650 finished pieces of furniture in mewgenics, in the end the game will feature over 750.. but that's not all!

there is a legend that tells of a magical cat that lived in nona's house... this cat had the ability to imbue anything it touched with magical properties! every item in the game has a very rare alt, that not only changes how the item looks (sometimes greatly) but also magnifies the effects the item has... so be on the look out for any items that features the "mark" of the nona cat!

counting the rare alt states that's over 1,500 items to collect in mewgenics.. and that's not counting the items that have random states inside them...

...........

Next we we shall talk about cat identity, what that means and how to teach your cat how to grow a mustache.

Source : mewgenics.com