dev on mew has been hard long and at times frustrating for sure. the cloest thing i can compair its design to is animal crossing and i didnt realize how weird a design like that can actually be to dev for.. i kinda want to talk to the team and ask.. how the hell did you do this.
because if you pick apart animal crossing a lot of it is small boring things.. like making a million items, players, dialog and upgrades.. thats the foundation of the game.. and its sadly not super exciting to work on.
so its been an uphill battle that im sure will pay off in the end. but its been frustrating at times for sure.. its hard to explain in detail but basicly if you can imagine tons of very deep and content heavy systems that all take a shit load of time to make.. but they dont all function as a whole yet because you are working on each one still.
its a giant undertaking for 2 guys, we had no idea what we were jumping into at all.. and we have a long road left. but it will be so fucking odd and differernt than anything else out there, im 100% sure ill feel great about it in the end.
here is a good example of what is currently on my plate… (tiny mew update)
im working on diseases, have been for a while.
diseases is a loose term we use for “things that effect a cat” they range from birth defects to a stubbed toe.. or aids!
the disease system looks like this…
when a cat is born there is an X% chance it gets a birth defect type disease. there are a shit ton of these, the more common ones are usually strictly negative, but the more rare you get the more positive the defect can become (like having a cat with an extra leg (moves faster and does more damage)
aside from the birth defects, there is a small % chance that when a cat does something it will roll into a disease acquired by XYZ. example:
Dot likes to hump! hes super horned up and humps anything that moves. behind the scenes there is a common chance that he will acquire “exhaustion” each time he humps, exhaustion is a timed “disease” that lowers the cats energy and makes him sleep longer.. a very basic common ailment acquired by an action. but for each action there are common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare and ultra mythic rare diseases for EVERY DAMN ACTION!
but diseases are a very important aspect of the game.. so they get a huge indepth system that requiters a lot of programming by tommy and a lot of scripting and drawing for me.
within this system also comes a disease transfer system.. so if a cat catches something contagious, it will spread it in a way that makes sense for the cat. like aids will only be transferable by humping or birth, the flu can be transfered by eating food and infecting it.. if another cat eats the infected food it will inturn get the flu as well..
its fucking nuts… but its a challenge and thats why we did it. it will just take some time to get it all working as intended.
hope that answered your question!