It’s no secret that we here at Rogueliker are pretty excited for Edmund McMillen’s upcoming cat-breeding roguelike, Mewgenics. The game looks absolutely bonkers in the best possible way and is shaping up to be every bit as deep as The Binding of Isaac, with a main campaign that can easily stretch beyond 200 hours.
With the game’s launch less than a month away (February 10th, to be precise), we were lucky enough to catch up with Mewgenics co-creator Tyler Glaiel and learn more about its turn-based combat, the team’s decision to avoid Early Access, and his collaborative relationship with McMillen.
And, if you’re looking to get up to speed ahead of launch, we’ve also rounded up everything we know so far about Mewgenics right here.
Read on for all the latest details…
RL: Thank you for agreeing to answer our questions! Our first is the easiest: how would you describe Mewgenics in your own words?
TG: You breed cats and take them on crazy adventures!
RL: A lot of roguelites choose to launch in Early Access these days. Considering the scope of the game, why did you decide to release Mewgenics the way you have?
TG: I don’t like Early Access and think it’s a bad fit for most games, especially ones with an actual campaign.
It fragments the community, removes the shared experience that people can have discovering things together at launch, and adds a whole lot of extra development pressure as a game in early access needs a continual flow of exciting new content every update, and limits the ability for devs to make drastic changes as experiments.
For Mewgenics, you will get to play a massive, complete, and full experience, along with everyone else at release.
RL: Real-world conditions like ADHD, autism, and dyslexia appear as inherited traits in Mewgenics. Were there any conditions you considered including but ultimately decided to remove or avoid?
TG: We tried to get as many as we could in-game for launch. There are over 100 of them. I don’t think there’s any that are off limits, and I think we were able to do right on all of the ones we added and can do right on any new ones we add in future DLCs. Can’t think of any that we avoided or removed on purpose.
RL: What kind of small details are there in Mewgenics that cat lovers, in particular, might pick up on or appreciate?
TG: You can pet the cats.
RL: Coming from largely action-focused games, what elements of designing turn-based combat for Mewgenics proved the most challenging?
TG: Boss design is the biggest one. The threshold for a “good enough” action fight is a lot lower than the threshold for a “good enough” turn-based fight, and you have a lot of extra knobs available to tweak when timings and hitbox sizes are involved.
We got a pretty good handle on how to make good bosses by the end of development, though, and were able to fix up many of the earlier ones to get them up to the standard we wanted. Definitely the most involved part of design, though.
RL: Mewgenics was first unveiled almost 13 years ago before being put on the back burner. How much has the game changed since that original vision?
TG: I wasn’t part of the original prototype (though, I was around to watch it happen). The original game was a Tamagotchi-esque cat sim, though it was never fully formed at the time it was teased. When the game got revived later, with me working on it, we started from scratch. The idea of “cat breeding” and the house were the important things; everything else was redesigned and refocused to fit into that.
What do you use these cats for after they breed? Well, the original prototype had simple Pokémon battles. The current tactical strategy battles are mainly just a “more advanced and in-depth” version of that. That became the main thing you use the cats for, so a lot of the other systems feed into that now. The basic idea is still there, it’s just in a form that actually works now.
RL: How do you and Ed work together, generally speaking? What’s the secret to your success as collaborators, do you think?
TG: I do programming, Ed does art, and we share in the design. We’re both capable designers and tend to agree on a lot of game design philosophy, so there’s not a lot of disagreements there. But, we aren’t afraid to disagree with each other about stuff either.
RL: We’ve heard Ed mention that there were already a couple of expansions in mind. How do you, as a game designer, go about deciding what should be in the game at launch and what can be added in later?
TG: We locked down the scope of the game around two years ago. Every new idea we had beyond that got added to a “DLC ideas” tab in our design spreadsheet. There is a *lot* in there, as this game just kind of constantly inspires new ideas.
RL: Now that you’re just one month out from launch, after six years of development, how does it feel knowing Mewgenics is almost in the hands of players?
TG: I’m very excited to see how people react to the game and extremely excited to watch all the Twitch streams and lets plays. I’m very much still in a “one day at a time” mode right now, though, trying to get the game done, so I’m trying to avoid looking too far ahead right now.
The day-to-day work for me is dying down, though, with very few things left to do. It’s a bit nice not having to crunch super hard leading up to release.
RL: Finally, do you actually like cats?
TG: Obviously.
RL: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!
Now to save you scrolling back up for that link, head this way for the Steam page for Mewgenics.
