Happy winter, fellow mimics.
Hopefully everyone’s new year has been off to a positive start. We’re certainly excited about what the rest of 2024 has in store with January coming to a close. Though our release schedule may have shifted, we have not stopped any of our work on the game. Rather we have expanded our scope of what we want Mimicry to be, and have more accurately realized that it’s going to take us a while to finish the game.
In the past two months especially, we have reconceptualized many central mechanics of the game, as well as its identity. While observable progress has been slow, we want to make sure we take our time to really define what exactly Mimicry is. What this means for you is that we don’t have a lot of actual game to show you, but let’s still take a look at what’s being worked on.
- Graphical Redesign -
An aspect of the game we’d been wanting to redesign from the ground up for a while was the UI. The inventory is a staple UI page in gaming, and while the current design in Mimicry works, it’s overcomplicated and doesn’t feel very special. We want the in-game menus to feel substantial, interactable, and not break the immersion of the game. The end results may vary quite a bit from concept art, but they inform the feeling that we want, which allows us to work from there.
It’s important to us that the inventory and equipment pages felt similar to each other yet still distinct. The physical feel of the equipment page was even more important to us as we really want to have equipped items that feel intractable.
Respriting
Much of UI redesigning goes hand in hand with the reworking of all of the sprites and textures in the game. This is a process that is very long and complex, and a lot of our work is and will be drastic changes to existing behind the scenes functionality. Because of how extensive these changes are going to be, and since they cover multiple topics, we’ll be saving a lot of this for the coming months. But speaking of topics to be discussed at a later point, let’s move onto something we promised in our last devlog.- Classes -
While there is an existing playable mimic in Mimicry, it doesn’t have any defining characteristics other than “mimic.” Since this is something we want all classes to have, we like to consider the current player option as a base model to which we can add personality and specialization. Of the four total classes that will be in the game, we have two that we want to discuss today.Lurker
Beginning with the sneakiest class, we have the Lurker. The Lurker focuses on stealth and mobility. Pick off enemies one by one while you use the secrets of the dungeon to your advantage. Strike from the shadows for greater damage, and slip away through passageways too small for enemies to pursue you through. While fully capable of engaging in head to head combat, the Lurker may not be the most fit option if combat escalates too quickly.Bruiser
The Bruiser is a class that is rather well suited to facing off against large groups of enemies. It is a much tankier mimic that uses stealth for heavy surprise attacks rather than unseen infiltration. There is little need for this class to use the dungeon as its weapon when the Bruiser is the weapon of the dungeon. Crushing enemies may make tasks feel easy, but sometimes the best skill may still be knowing which fights to avoid.
Two More
There are still two classes yet to be properly announced. While we are very excited about what they are, and want to share them, they’re not quite ready yet. As such, they won’t be in the 0.3 update along with the Lurker and Bruiser. Don’t worry, they won’t be too far behind, and will show up in 0.4. We’ll discuss the future updates more down below.Skill Tree
Even after the player chooses a class, all that is given are the tools to create a playstyle. Different playstyles are not even limited to different playthroughs of the game. Unlock different types of abilities, then mix and match to create loadouts for high combat or stealthy evasion situations.
There are three types of skills on the skill tree: roots, stems, and abilities. The three roots make up all of the abilities that can be unlocked, and each one: Jaws, Tongue, and Mimification, tell what all of its derived abilities will be. Specialize in Jaws to gain powerful bites and stunning roars, or use the mimic’s Tongue abilities to pull enemies towards you or crawl across the ceiling like a disgusting chest snail. Mimification contains the abilities that use mimicry, the strongest available to the mimic, such as weapon imitation and many more exciting feats.
Stems are unlocked just like abilities, but are not themselves a special ability. They connect several abilities under a sub group, sort of like a smaller version of a root. Since the stem doesn’t have any benefits inherently, unlocking it will let the player then immediately unlock one of its derivative abilities.
