Heyho,

no new content this time around, but i'm happy that we got the Mac build up and running. We are using Godot, which can export to OS X in principle, but i wasn't able to properly test the export and set up the Steam side of things. Luckily, our Community over on our Discord helped us with getting the Mac build for Dome Romantik up and running. Dome Romantik is the game we currently develop - a roguelike action mining game, so pretty far away from moggies, theme wise. In any case, the experience over there helped us getting Moggies ready for Mac :) There is also a small fix in this update, preventing clicks into the UI that should be hidden behind a dark overlay. Until now, if you had the pause menu open, you could still use the ingame UI, like the button to open the cat license. Be sure to check out the community levels, if you haven't yet! Sort by new to see what was added recently. You'll find very creative levels that require completely different approaches than the ones you saw in the campaign. Overall, the quality of the community levels is very impressive to me, the players really put in a lot of thinking and only published good levels.
Maybe we'll also add a wee bit of new content in the future. Now that i had some distance to the game, new ideas for animals came to me. We'll see how that works out, as it can't slow down the development Dome Romantik. Let me know if there is anything strange going on in the game.

Have Fun :)

[ 2021-11-14 23:00:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone,

this is just a tiny update fixing a single thing. Still, it was important to get right to honor the achievement of the players :) It surprises me each time it happens, but now and again a new player comes around who does still find a few better solutions than anyone else before. Once known, the new best solutions are also reached by other players, but still this initial "discovery" stands out and should be listed first in the hall of fame.

Fixes

• changed ordering of hall of fame entries, so that entries with the same score are sorted by who was first

Thank you @tuure for reporting it, shows a great sportsmanship in this!

Thanks :)

[ 2021-09-14 15:26:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello again,

there were a few issues with space characters, both in player names and level names. The result was that some counts were wrong, like community levels showing 5 people solved the level, while it was actually 10. It also impacted the hall of fame, which players with a space in their name couldn't enter. I'm not sure when this issue appeared, because this worked fine in april. In any case this is fixed now both in the backend and in the game. As our current main project, we're developing Dome Romantik. I'm the bottleneck there right now, so Anne had some time to do something else. She gave the Steam artwork for Moggies another try, we hope you like it :)
I also want to spotlight a new community level from tuure. He made 3 very good levels already, but this one is pretty crazy - check out the move count. The level doesn't look so bad, does it? But it's very challenging, i haven't solved it myself yet. I also like his other levels also a lot, because they do something i didn't think of in the months developing the game, while being in the same style as the campaign (only a few elements on the puzzle).

Fixes

• fixed players not being able to enter the hall of fame, if their name containes a space
• fixed play counts and level ratings of community levels not being registered, if the level name or user name contains a space

That's it for this time. Have fun :)

[ 2021-07-16 10:13:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyho,

a few fixes were needed in the last few days. There was a very ambitious and successful player named tuure, who got to lead the hall of fame and the snake minigame. He also went for the sokoban minigame and got close to beating all the 90 levels of it, which i never expected anyone to do. To my shock, i realized i never checked what happens if you reach 90. So i went and tested it, and was greeted with a crash upon trying to load the nonexistent level 91. The last patch solved this, and it got a somewhat proper ending now. Tuure also made a very good community level. While trying to solve it, i noticed that the ambience would stop eventually. There were some pieces that were not configured to loop, and thus ended in silence. This is also fixed now. Other than that, we haven't planned anything for Moggies right now, as we are busy working on Dome Romantik.

Fixes

• fixed a crash when solving the last sokoban level
• fixed some ambience tracks that were not looping properly

In unrelated news: back in may we were invited to a very cool, small, german convention/streaming event. This was our "booth".
It was fun being there! I just wanted to share this because i thought it looked cute :D

That's it for this time. Have fun :)

[ 2021-07-11 18:10:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey hey people,

it's finally time for the big update (along with a proper discount)! We prepared many nice things and hope you'll agree.

The Hedgehog

He won't be easily caught thanks to his spikiness. I wonder if balls and spikes play nice together! You can find the hedgehog exclusively in the community levels, so check them out if you didn't have a chance yet.

Sokoban Minigame

The third minigame arrived in the form of Sokoban, including a highscore. It actually contains all 90 levels of the public domain original game. Though i have to say, playing Of Mice and Moggies levels before makes the Sokoban levels feel a bit tedious.

New Ambience

I bought a big, professional quality nature ambience pack providing over two hours of a very pleasant acoustic backdrop to your thinking. It's not everyones preference, but i really enjoy the relaxation and calm that comes with this. In this process, i also removed some of the old, shorter ambience tracks that could become annoying if looped too often.

Ending

If you complete the last beach level, you'll actually see an ending. Nothing spectacular, but hey, it's something. You can revisit the scene from a photo in your cat license. A little teaser (spoiler!): [spoiler]----------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------ [/spoiler]

Hall of Fame

Something i didn't expect to happen at all happened, multiple times actually: Some people finished the game 100%, each and every level. To honor those puzzle masters, we added a Hall of Fame. Visit it via the Statue on the campaign map.

Fixes & Improvements

• chinese and japanese language support - changeable in the options
• option to disable that the camera is zoomed in after each level - thanks Dohi for the suggestion!
• option to move the camera with left mouse + drag (default ist only right mouse) - thanks Dohi and Recur!
• color improvements for the turtle and stones
• one new stone variant
• community levels now have a calculated difficulty level
• fixed community level preview being at the wrong zoom level for the first level
• fixed the calculation of the rank in case there was a campaign level removed previously
• controller support for the community level selection
• added missing ball explanations to explanations screen - thanks Dohi for reporting!
• improved UI seperator graphic
• changed the way the ambience tracks are loaded to improve startup time

That's it

- for this update. Right now, we don't have plans for another content update, but i'm always listening to feedback and carefully consider every suggestion (best place for this is our discord, please join). I hope you'll have fun and that i'll see some more cool levels from you folks. Here is one that made me laugh since it is so different from my levels, but challenging in its own way - fantastic work, Puffin!

Thank you for playing, have fun! :)

[ 2021-04-15 21:02:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyho folks,

we were busy improving Of Mice and Moggies again! There will be a big content update in a few weeks, bringing a new animal with interesting mechanics, new high quality ambience music and at least 2 new minigames. Until then, we might make a small update depending on our progress and necessary fixes. Anne split her time between improving the campaign map and adding animations for the animals. Here you can see some parts of the new animations.
Do you know the phenomenon, where you have to yawn if you see someone yawning? Well, Anne was constantly yawning when creating the yawning cat, which was pretty funny to watch :D

Improvements

• New idle animations for mouse, cat and dog.
• Spiderweb now finally inhabited by a spider.
• Changed Playing Field 6 to prevent an easier than intended solution.
• Changed Woods 8 again to make the easier solution not be optimal (still possible though).
• Exit level button now consistently shown in Pause Menu when in any level.
• Levels can now be started by clicking twice on the level pad (thank you ricky for the suggestion).
• Turtle levels now have a proper icon, not the water drop

This is a before and after comparison of some areas that got improved. If you look closely, i hope you can see that some parts were really rough before and now look a lot nicer.

Fixes

• Cancel button in editor on place element popup now works properly.
• Fixed Level controls overlaying pause menu in community levels.
• Move counter in any level now updates to the proper state when restarting a level (thank you Puffin for the bug report!).
• Fixed step sound timing on lower or higher animation speed.

Experimentation

We always experiment under the hood. These things often get replaced before you get to see them, or scrapped completely. One of these things are the biomes, the different decorations for the actual puzzle levels. Anne drew a different color scheme for the lizard area.
We always wanted to do different biomes, with more objects on the outside of the map - but this got more complicated than i expected. For example in the image below - if this should be the lizard area, the vegetation does not fit. We'd another type of bush, something dry which fits the region. The grassy nature also does not represent what we see on the campaign map.
With the 10 different areas we have right now, this is too much for us, especially considering we still want to improve other parts of the game. It is also much more difficult than giving it a new coat of paint, as the biomes all would need to fit the given animals and colors. So for now, we won't try to make decorations for each of the 10 biomes/regions of the campaign map.

Up Next

The big content update will follow soon, end of march or in the first half of april. I want to pair it with a discount, but there are limits how often a game can be discounted, which i have to take into account still. I also plan to revamp the minigame appearance, so that you can choose which minigame to unlock, instead of always getting the same order. I also want to say again: It is amazing to us that you play our game!

That's it for this update. I always appreciate all your feedback!

[ 2021-03-14 22:29:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey hey people,

here comes a small update again. I saw some great community levels already, that's amazing! That's why it was important to me to deliver this update soon, as it fixes a bug where the rating you give a level is not properly stored. It will work again now.

Fixes

• Community Levels: ratings are now registered again (sorry!)
• Community Levels: added missing translation of "back to campaign" button in pause menu (thank you @puffin)
• Community Levels: back button in community levels doesn't read as "back to campaign map" anymore
• Editor: fixed elements being displayed at the wrong position, if the window is zoomed and the mouse is not hovering over a tile
• Editor: fixed camera resetting to default position with every map change

Improvements

• removed the difficulty rating from the level feedback. This will be calculated automatically soon.
• you can now always rate a level you didn't rate yet, not only the first time solving it
• re-added the level preview, as it might be nice to know the levlels name beforehand
• Woods 8 got changed to deliver the intended challenge
• added an interesting level to the playing field area

Campaign Map

Anne still improves the campaign map visually. Half the day she works on the campaign map, the other half is spent on new animations and content right now. The Lizard and Spider areas are mostly done.

Up Next

The next update will bring new animations for the cat and maybe more. You'll also finally be able to meet the spiders that created all those webs! Additionally, there will be some great, high quality nature ambiences added.

That's it for this update. Come to our discord to chat :)

[ 2021-03-05 22:21:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyho,

apart from the map improvements, i got two bigger tasks at hand and a few starting to take form in the background.

Performance in Minigames

Some players advanced further than i thought possible in snake mode. Of Mice and Moggies is not at all optimized to run with that many map objects, causing a drop in FPS at some point. This might be a surprise, as the game looks so simple - but any game that is poorly optimized for a specific tasks can run badly on any machine. However, I did some profiling and improved the performance a bit. I'll keep watching the highscores and improve as necessary. If you have performance issues, please tell me (easily hearable if the footsteps in snake get slower). I also raised the maximum speed, as it seemed to be too easy so you could go indefinetely - maybe because of the control improvementes from Update #2.

Rank and Move Counters

I got some very valuable Feedback about the move counters (thank you Alan!). I think it might be interesting to a few people with how few moves a level can be done. For many it isn't. Basing a whole rank system on that was too much, especially with 4 ranks. The possible different solutions are not that interesting, and i don't think it's a lot of fun to find a solution that takes 54 instead of 56 steps. Because of this, i removed the rank system completely. You now get one point for each campaign level finished. After getting a certain amount of points, a minigame is unlocked - for now. After beating a level, you'll see how many moves are used in the best known solution and will get your move counters. This is still subject to change. The whole thing was mostly an expansion on the highscore system we had in our game jame entry this game is based on: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/fluffensnuff. The highscore there is gone, sadly. Medals are not changed in any way.

Fixes

• fixed a small layout error of a tutorial popup
• fixed crash when pressing "try again" in community level
• fixed crash when trying to leave the level with the bottom left button in community level
• gamepad controls in labyrinth are now only shown when gamepad is actually used
• snake mode popup will now work better with gamepad
• headlines from explanations are now translated, were missing before
• snake highscore will not get confused by switching profiles

Improvements

• Snake mode will run a bit better with many dogs around and will get faster
• added a button in the pause menu to go back to the campaign, if inside a level

Up Next

There are only two minigames right now, but i plan to add many more. I have many candidates and one implemented but not polished. If you have ideas, i'm happy to hear them ;) The Map got some improvements too. There are proper bridges across the river now, and the lizard area also got proper plank bridges. It will be improved further in the next small Updates.
We are working on this little fella too
Still testing the colors and shapes. What would happen if a ball meets a hedgehog? I'll also start giving the updates sequential numbers.

That's it for now. I hope you have fun! I'm here.

[ 2021-03-01 23:16:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyho,

we are staying busy and got some improvements and fixes. A big thanks to you for the great bug reports, i'll note the reporter behind the note :)

Improvements

• improved beach and hot spring area visually
• snake mode now plays ambience instead of music (music is too short to play constantly there)
• snake mode movement changed to a constant delay between moves. Before, catching a mouse took more time than a normal move, which could throw off your timing.

Fixes

• fixed wrong control hint in editor (thanks @Seahorse)
• fixed levelpad for snake mode making an entry mutliple times (thanks @Seahorse)
• fixed a bug where a restart after winning a level would mess with the best known solution (thanks @Puffin)
• in snake mode, moles should disappear between stages and never appear inside the grid
• snake highscore now shows your name for your score instead of "Rene". Which is my name, and which was hard coded. When testing the "your highscore entry shows your name"-feature looked good to me ;)
• snake highscore now also shows your name on the very first time it enters the leaderboard. Previously it only showed if you did reload the board. Thank you Pete for reporting it, i'm glad to say your score got saved, it just didn't show on your board.

That's next

• visually improve all the bridges on the campaign map (still look rough)
• Minigame #3, hopefully
• i'm pondering over reducing the relevance of the rank and only have a solved/not solved state, with the best solution only being informative

Let me know if you'd like to see something improved, added or removed :)

[ 2021-02-25 22:23:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyho,

a small patch with some improvements :)

• fixed snake highscore not counting beyond 9
• playing field area and surrounds got visually improved - more to come soon

Tiny improvements

• snake highscore now only lists each player once
• snake highscore shows your entry an animated label instead of a larger font
• snake highscore immediately shows any improvement
• snake stage now shows the current stage with a wavy label

One thing is not solved in this patch, but will come next: The first time you enter the snake highscore, you are not immeadiately listed. But it is stored properly, so it will show the next time you start the minigame and update properly then.

If you have any feedback, i'm all ears :)

[ 2021-02-24 11:45:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, Ren here! I'm happy to announce that we'll be part of the charity stream event MEDIC of the Invite Gaming e.V., tomorrow 22nd January at 12:00. The whole stream will be in german language though. The Event: https://invite-gaming.de/medic The Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/invitegaming The goal of the event is to raise donations for the children hospice Berliner Herz. Felix of Invite Gaming will play Of Mice and Moggies live. I'll join him as developer of the game / backseat gamer, and will of course be available for any questions. There will also be some keys as give aways, so join us if you can :) Thanks a lot to Games & XR Mitteldeutschland, who made this possible by sponsoring us.

[ 2021-01-21 21:31:26 CET ] [ Original post ]