Hey vampires,


This patch fixes blockers, such as the inability to interact with objects in chapter 5 and 6, getting stuck in the vodka bar, low relationship points with Kirill, and much more.

If you’d like to read all the fixes, they’ll be listed below! There is a lot to bite into!

• Fixed an edge case blocker from interacting with objects in the beginning of Chapters 5 and 6
  
• Fixed a potential progression blocker for Petya after reloading a save post receiving a Cerulean silk dress
  
• Fixed edge cases stopping from interacting with the chimney in Chapter 6
  
• Fixed getting stuck in the vodka bar after Evgeny's card game in Chapter 6
  
• Fixed task for giving Marusia the book not crossing off
  
• Fixed infinite resell of Marusia's book possibility
  
• Allowed a potential extra day to give Marusia gifts
  
• Added a failsafe to not access Hussar's quest while you are at the graveyard entrance with Roman
  
• Fixed repeated notifications for Roman's gifted book unlocking
  
• Fixed changing relationships after purchases if the vendor is dead
  
• Removed the ability to discard Faina's plant by accident
  
• Fixed some bio items for Rusalka and Petya
  
• More edge case Iskra logic fixes
  
• Fixed a painting in Town Hall VO line
  
• Fixed the "Ousted" achievement trigger
  
• Excluded the possibility of accidentally pressing a UI item outside of the Hub when it's open
  
• Replaced a special missing symbol in one of the text strings
  
• Fixed more Alisa/Hussar conflict edge cases
  
• Fixed Hookah bar customers' occasional animation issues
  
• Fixed some bio items for Kolya and Anastasia/Evgeny edge cases in Epilogue
  
• Made it a little easier to get a higher relationship with Kirill
  
• Fixed a potential inability to complete Roman's ending
  
• Fixed some Faina edge cases that can get Liza stuck outside of her apartment
  
• Removed the non-functional discount option for the General Store
  
• Improved the collider on the left side of the Town Hall
  
• Fixed an edge case nihilism loss in Chapter 5
  
• Typo fixes
  
• Glossary category details font increase
  
• Increased font size for inventory item names
  
• Increased the size of the Action Points clock (time of day on main HUD)

- Riv otter

• Syria has been added. (As of the first half of 2024, you can access Syria by clicking on it via "Syria & Iraq" when you are on map of Turkey)
  
• Now, instead of going to rallies yourself you can assign your mayoral candidate in the province (after reaching a certain number of votes nationwide).
  
• Added minor events triggered when interest groups reach 50% influence.
  
• Minor changes to rally fees.
  
• Rally results now have a randomized payoff instead of a fixed vote gain/loss (e.g. a perfect rally now has a vote gain between +2% and +4.5% instead of a fixed +4%).
  
• Reduced the speed of boosting international relations.
  
• Reduced the slot for improving international relations from 3 to 2.
  
• Secretary bonuses have been balanced.
  
• Added new party logos.
  
• Added new party colors.
  
• Added texture filtering to the avatar window and avatars in the dialog box. (Glare caused by scale differences has been fixed.)
  
• The base text color has been set to a slightly lighter color, so that the color highlights will appear relatively more prominent.
  
• Updated the color codes in the text template, meaningless spaces in the hint boxes will disappear significantly.

• The height at which dialog boxes appear has been increased. They will now appear a little higher on the screen (Dialog boxes are intended to center the screen).
  
• Fixed a bug where provinces that were neither visited nor rallied at the end of the year were gaining votes when they should have been losing votes.
  
• A few text corrections were made in Turkish and English.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented chips from spawning with empty clue boxes.
  
• Fixed a bug with clue boxes appearing when the Buildings window was open.
  
• Edited some texts manually so that they do not spill out of the hint boxes.
  
• Added descriptions of missing provinces (for photos and descriptions of provinces you can send your own photos or your own text!)
  
• Numerous text corrections have been made in all languages.

In the next update, the “Early Access” period will end with international visits and a few simple edits and finishing touches. Don't forget to leave your requests in the comments!

• Acoin will save again.
  
• RK-1017 mine kill fix.

• Added tutorial

• Lowered starting health

• Made space bar opens the map side panel, presses side panel button and hides step popup to allow for faster navigation on the map
  
• Made space bar ends fight when end fight button is showing

• Fixed issue caused by a multi attacking unit moving or dying inbetween attacks
  
• Fixed issue that would cause the autopass feature to pass during card effects

New:

• Rewards spawn next to the doors on a small altar
  
• New upgrade: PV max
  
• New upgrade: Melee damage

Bug fix:

• Play sound out of focus parameter is not saved
  
• Music is not looping in the main menu
  
• Speed down intro video
  
• Soft lock after the intro when opening a menu
  
• A lot of smaller bugs

• Changed the Veil Piercer enemy in Sector 108+ to have higher max damage taken per hit
  
• Added highest level indicator and Acclimation level time at highest level to Aspect tool tips
  
• UT seed no longer increments on auto complete
  
• Fixed duration hangar is down in sector 125 and 126
  
• Fixed torpedo damage displays
  
• Fixed damage stat display on reinforce screen
  
• Fixed UT stat issue
  
• Fixed Crew Splicing total Humanity/Corruption not updating on Acclimation gain
  
• Some localization updates for Crew Splicing

To win the prize, all you need to do is play the game and find the new limited cosmetic item “Shining Star”!


The rules are as follows:

1. Find the “Shining Star” item
   
2. Start a trade offer with me: https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffer/new/?partner=17306686
   
3. Trade me the “Shining Star” item (Don’t worry, you will get it back)

Alternatively, you can also message me directly on Steam or Discord to show me the item in-game.

• Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197977572414/
  
• Discord: Add “Lizzard4000”

Hello, fellas!

New Brazilian Portuguese localization is finally live. Done by Masamune (http://masamune.com.br/), who translated SoR4, TMNT, Yakuza like a Dragon, Fading Afternoon etc. So I hope you'll be satisfied with the quality.

Enjoy.

Hello Everyone 👋

This has been really tough to keep quiet about, but the day has finally come to share the news…




We JUST announced the release date as part of the fabulous Games with Wings Showcase, celebrating all the lovely Women in Games 💪In case you missed it, don’t fear!! You can watch it all back here and be sure to check out all the other incredible titles.


I can’t wait to finally hand the full game to you and see what you think of this weird and wonderful world we’ve been working on for over 10 YEARS! So in the meantime, be sure to add Freeride to your Wishlist join our discord and follow us on Twitter/X, Threads & Tiktok! Oh and also tell all your friends! 🎉

May you Solve your Unfinished Business,

-The Flightyfelon Games Team

Hey, Tyler here! Part of the work over the past month has been rebalancing and reworking some of the existing bosses in the game, (mostly ones in the middle third of the game, as everything in the first third is pretty well tuned at this point). Believe it or not, not every boss we make works well on the first try. Crazy eh? So I'd figure I'd go over a bit about what makes a good boss in this type of game and how we approach rebalancing and reworking and testing existing bosses, for a little bit of development insight here.

So lets start with what makes a good boss in Mewgenics?
Well, a boss's roll in any game is to test a player in the skills that they should have acquired at that point in the game. For Mewgenics there's 2 major categories of skill to test here, your tactical decision making, and your ability to build a team. For early-run bosses, the only thing we can reasonably test in a boss fight is tactical decision making, as you haven't had that many teambuilding decisions yet. For later bosses, they need to also be a test of your ability to build a functional team.

Now, Mewgenics is a Tactical Strategy game, so you need to be able to use strategy and tactics to beat a boss. The ones that work are the ones that let you do this, and the bosses that "don't work" typically feel more like "big meatbags" where you just hit them and hope you kill them before they kill you. Those bosses fulfill the role of a gear check (testing your team building skill) but fail at properly testing your moment to moment tactical decision making. That's no good, and the bosses that feel like that get added to the queue for a redesign. We've gotten better at this as we worked on the game, but probably about half of the bosses have needed at least a minor redesign to make fun.

Unfortunately most of the bosses I was working on this month are all past the spoiler wall so I can't show them. But I can use examples of other bosses we have shown before, which went through tweaks, redesigns and rebalances in the past.


He throws bombs. They explode. You can dodge the bombs, or tank them, or use an attack to defuse the bombs instead of hitting the rat, or try to manipulate the rat into getting hit by his own bombs, or try to burst down the rat before the bombs even explode, or stun him so he can't throw bombs, or understand how how AI works and try to manipulate where he throws the bombs, or any number of other things. This is what a good early game boss is like.



Radical Rat was the very first boss I implemented into the game, way back in 2020. His mechanical design has remained essentially unchanged since then, with mostly just small changes to health and damage, and a few visual updates. It was unclear to a lot of people that you could attack the bombs to disarm them, so we made the bombs look like little rat heads to make them seem more like an enemy you can kill instead of an inanimate object, along with tooltips and some other hints about that. With that fix, he feels like the perfect "first boss" now.



Radical Rat also had one problem that wasn't apparent when he was first designed- if it was raining when you reached him, his bombs would just get automatically defused by the rain the instant he threw them, and it was no longer a fight at all. He had no other way to damage you besides those bombs. So we gave him an alternate behavior where if it's raining he just chucks the bombs directly at your face instead! Take that!





Boris was the *second* boss I implemented into the game. His original design had him moving around trampling and dashing at you, and he would fart on you and dash away if you hit him from behind. He had a lot of HP but took extra damage if you attacked him from behind. This version of Boris was just... not fun. He was a big meat bag and there wasn't all that much decision making in his fight. There wasn't any easy way to dodge his attacks other than staying away from him, and all you had to do was just hit him till he died.



When it came time to put Boris in context as the boss of the Sewers, it was immediately clear that his design wasn't good, and that he would need to have a bit of a redesign. There was over a year between implementing him and actually having him placed into his spot in the sewers, so by the time I had to revisit him we had made a lot more enemies and bosses and content in between. As such the first step for this redesign was to just, cut all the mechanics off of him that we no longer used anywhere else in the game. So his "butt takes extra damage" effect is gone (no other enemies are "extra weak" to backstab like this), and his fart clouds are gone (the cloud layer ended up not being used because of visual overlapping issues). With those removed, his "dash forward when hit in the butt" effect didn't feel right anymore, as it was too easy to work around (just dont hit him in the butt at all), so that was cut.

With that stuff cut all that was left of the fight was just Boris moving towards you and occasionally dashing through your team. He needed *something else* to make the fight actually good. But there's an issue, he already had his animations made, and animations are the most time consuming part of development. So whenever possible, these redesigns need to use existing animations instead of requiring new ones (This more relevant for the later spoiler bosses that I can't show, who have quite insane animations, which makes tweaking and redesigning them quite interesting). Boris doesnt have any sort of melee attack or spit attack animations, he just has move and dash. So the thing I ended up doing was giving him a reaction that makes him move 1 space towards you whenever you damage him. Boris has Trample so he can run over you and your teammates as part of this reaction. And it didn't need any new animations!



The movement reaction really makes the fight into something great. It's an incredibly dynamic and fun fight now. Instead of being able to just beat on the meatbag until hes dead, now you have to consider positioning with *every* attack. You can use cheap weak attacks to bait him across the map away from your team, or stun him so melee attackers can get free hits in, or just tank his trample damage and hit him from up close, and you have to make sure he wont trample over your other cats when he moves towards you. Its crazy how such a small change turned Boris for a boring meat bag into one of the most fun fights in the game. He's remained mostly unchanged since then, aside from some balance number tweaks.



We've made a lot of bosses over the course of making this game, and one of the things we noticed was that if a boss is designed from its own perspective, meaning, the design is "what the boss does", it usually doesn't work well right away. "He jumps over here and then punches you and then does a cool mega attack", those kinds of designs work fine in an action game like The Binding of Isaac, but the bar for what makes a good fight in a tactical game like Mewgenics is a lot higher than that. Fights like that are not made from the correct perspective, and fixing them requires reorienting and designing from the player team's perspective instead. "OK to fight this guy you can do A, or B, or C, and have to consider X and Y when doing so" and making sure that the boss's abilities and skills are designed to foster those sorts of decision trees instead of just "looking cool and doing stuff".

A lot of our later bosses do just start out as "Looks cool, random bullshit go!". One particular one we had in place (which I can't show, because spoilers) was *so cool looking* that most of our beta testers reported it as a high point of the game when they first reached it. But the fight itself didn't quite live up to how cool the boss looked. It again just played out like a "Big Meatbag" fight. We're not content with visuals being the only cool part about a fight, so this was one we had to rework last month. It's an interesting challenge figuring out how to change a boss in a way that requires as few new animations as possible, and sometimes requires a whole day or two of brainstorming to really nail down what it needs. It's absolutely worth it though, and we've been able to fix every boss we needed to, often taking them into "this is one of the best fights in the game now" territory.

There's a few general classes of boss mechanics we have that often result in interesting tactical decisions on the player's part, and after having made ~50 bosses/minibosses so far we were able to pick out some of the things that differentiate the good ones from the ones that needed work. "Reactions" are a big category, Zodiac's "shoot anything that moves", Boris's "Move towards whoever damages you", and Chubs & Nubs' "spit-when-hit" are good examples of reactions that make for fun and interesting gameplay, and sometimes the way to fix a boss is just to give it some kind of interesting reaction to play around. "Multiple Targets" is another one, where simply having multiple different things to pay attention to and consider how to prioritize fighting can be fun, even if the individual targets are fairly basic. "Keep Away" is another one where the boss has a sub-goal they want to accomplish (like reaching a specific object on the map) and you have to consider how you can prevent or delay the boss from reaching that goal. There's a bunch of others, and combinations of these also work well. Maybe we can talk more about it all once the game is released and I don't have to avoid spoilers!!!



We have ~3 more bosses to animate, and I have 5 more bosses and 6 more minibosses to implement. Some of them (and some of the existing ones) will still need tweaks and adjustments.

Anyway here's a trailer update from Edmund:

As mentioned in previous posts due to the LA fires our trailer has been delayed slightly, Flynn is fine and working hard on polishing up the trailer as I type this! This teaser is a fun one, totally breaks all the rules of video game trailers but does feature a lot of gameplay footage in rapid succession so we have also spent the last week recording said footage and pruning it down to the most spicy bits!

here is a teeeeny tiny snipit of the trailer for your eyeballs!



The trailer will def be done by mid/late march but with GDC and april fools around the bend im not 100% sure if we will release it till our next update in april.

Stay tuned!