Well hello again! it's been an interesting month on the dev side of mew! 

So the big news is that IGN came out to my home office last Friday to record footage for a "First Hands-On Preview". So the last 2 weeks of dev we pulled everyone off what they were actively working on to have them work on polish instead. Since this will be our first actual gameplay footage, we wanted it to look as smooth as possible. That meant tons of smooth and updated transitions, animations, UI polish, and short animations to establish the start and end of a run. 

Many of you may have noticed in videos and gifs, each run your team will be assigned a name, like The Fighting Fatties, or Tom and the Nerds. Well with the addition of the adventure intro, you now get to see its big reveal!

And if you happen to just take one or two cats out, the titles will change accordingly.

And like the boss vs screen, one cat will randomly say something from a pool of many things depending on their class… just for fun. 

The way we do team names depends on two cats the game feels best represent your team, then will assign an adjective and noun based on those cats' classes to become your official team name!
In testing we saw a lot of positive response to the team names, things cats say, and even the randomly chosen cat names. It's kind of crazy what a few names and words will do to paint a fun little picture of the cat's personality or the team's general theme.

Like the time Little Toad the dwarf finally got with the lady he was courting back home.

Or that time the "Untamed Backstabbers" all went insane and turned on one another...

Polish is fun, and we have a ton more to add, but I'm quite happy with what we got in for the IGN preview. Speaking of the preview, be on the lookout for it in the next 7–10 days! I'll toss it up where/when it's live. They played the game for almost 5 hours and it was extremely fun to watch, so here's hoping they enjoyed it as much as we did watching it!

our press/marketing strategy timeline is as follows (subject to change).

- May: IGN hands-on preview!
- June: A mini release date trailer.
- July-Aug: Tyler and I start doing monthly streams of the game.
- Sept+: Press pushes and maybe I'll remake the old mewgenics comic to hand out at cons?

Speaking of timelines, where are we now? here is a little list of the major things still on our plate for this year.

- Final boss is now fully drawn, and designed! just needs to be animated and implemented.
- 1.5 other bosses need to be fully animated and implemented.
- 1 late game boss needs to be implemented (otherwise complete)
- Rare alt furniture needs to be added (art is done, just needs to be added and tested) This will bring the furniture count above 1200.
- One late game core mechanic still needs to be implemented and tested (it's loosely implemented, just needs to be polished and heavily tested)
- 4 major cutscenes need to be animated and 4 minor ones.
- Cat mutations are nearly finished! (should be 100% by end of month)

Now it's time to address the big question on most of your minds.. is mewgenics releasing this year? if so what quarter?

So, just to be transparent this is our current thought process on a release.

Since late last year our target release was always going to be mid-late oct 2025. we hit a few minor snags along the way and at this point it's looking like an oct release is still possible if we crunch for the remaining months and maybe just push localization to post release.

BUT, what if we run into an issue?
What if multiple huge games release in oct and just suck the wind out of everything?
What if we crunch and a few people break and we can't make it?

As many of you know I've had a few rough launches and they were all tied to locking down a release date too early and then something bad happening that made crunch so grueling release became impossible... So while an Oct release is possible, I really don't think it's smart and I don't wanna risk 6 years of work on the possibility of a bad release...

So if not Oct then when? 

That's kind of where we are at this point... but in 30 days we have a much more clear picture of what's possible, lock down a hard release date and pop it in at the end of our next trailer!

i gotta get back to work!
see you next week with a much cooler update!

-Edmund

PS: i'll leave you with a few shots from our tester discord. we have a new channel just to show off your cats.. here are a few I can share.

<3

how cool was that!?

The trailer was made by the amazing Flynn Papandrea[www.instagram.com] and features the musical stylings of Ridiculon[ridiculon.bandcamp.com]!

There is a lot in there to unpack; feel free to watch it a few times, memorize it, and show your friends and family! (Seriously, help spread the word!)

Now on to a little dev blog update.

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The last month has been very focused on adding in all the remaining late-game bosses, tuning mid-game bosses, hooking up cutscenes, and locking down the designs for the remaining final bosses.

We also realized a mid/late-game boss just wasn't as memorable as the others in that cycle, so we decided to expand it greatly, including a whole new musical track by Ridiculon! (Personally one of my favorite tracks currently.)

Next on the list for this month:

- Draw and animate the very final boss.
This boss also needs custom background art, so we gotta get on that as well.

- Add in overworld map visual mini cutscenes.
We have had placeholder map progression for ages and just now got all the new map art by Sony_Shock rigged up to be animated. It should help with visualizing the lay of the land and your adventure's progress.

- Implement remaining mutations/items.
We recently hired a new programmer (Steve Swink) to help with the mini mountain of mutations that still need to be implemented.

- Balance act 3.
Outside of the big bad final boss, I'll also be bouncing around act 3 and attempting to tune and balance it so it feels substantial difficulty-wise without being utterly crushing.

We are also polishing things up a bit more so the game can look extra spicy for our first hands-on video we are doing with IGN; it should come out next month. Once we have broken the seal with that, we may start doing a few streams—depending on when we lock down the release date. More on that next month.

Exciting times! :)

-Edmund