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 ]