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Hey folks, here’s a little look at what I’ve been working on since last week: caves! Before I go into much detail though, keep in mind that Cassette Beasts is still under development and anything mentioned here could change before its release.

Side quests in Cassette Beasts can often take you to caves in any part of the island of New Wirral. Caves can be entered at any time though, so if you’re looking for valuable resources, rare monsters, or just new routes and shortcuts across the island, you may want to explore them anyway.

The contents of caves vary a lot. Some simply contain one of the caches the rangers leave around to encourage exploration. Others contains puzzles to solve, or test your skill with your movement abilities!

But one thing all caves have in common is that they’re inhabited by some quite fearsome monsters. Rogue Fusions–minibosses that are half one monster and half another–can be found here. These ferocious beasts attack on sight, and when they get to the surface can cause drastic weather and ecological disturbances. Part of the reason the rangers were set up in New Wirral was to keep these creatures under control!

Defeating a rogue fusion splits it into its two component monsters, who will then be able to have a chance at regular monster life.

Rogue fusions are a good source of bootleg monsters to record for your tape collection. Bootlegs have altered colour schemes, types, and movesets. Having one in your party can open up a ton of new battle strategies!

There are several much more substantial dungeons (and bosses!) to find around New Wirral, but we’ll write about those another time.

That’s all we have for now! As always, to keep up with the latest info, follow our studio twitter account and/or join our growing Discord community!

If we don’t find time to post again before the new year, then I hope you all have safe holidays and a happy new year!

Development on Cassette Beasts has been going really well! Today I want to show you some gameplay footage of New Wirral Park. So here’s Jay expertly dodging all the monsters and sneaking past NPCs!

New Wirral Park is the first major open area you come to after the game’s opening, with connections leading off to several others. We’re drawing inspiration from Breath of the Wild in the world design–there are many ways through each area and multiple ways to solve each puzzle.

There aren’t any flat surfaces you can see here that you can’t somehow get to and walk on, but sometimes you’ll need special abilities! These abilities can be obtained by recording certain monsters to tape. In the video you can see the Mothwing Glide ability and Electromagnetism. The rest we’ll show another time!

Townsfolk whisper rumours and speculate about something large buried under New Wirral Park. The Dandylions in the park must be guarding something, after all…

Fusion is our headline feature for Cassette Beasts. It’s something that is so rarely available in the monster-collecting genre, but frequently requested by the fanbase! There are so many pieces of awesome Pokémon fusion fan art out there…

To get a feel for how Cassette Beasts’ fusions look, and what sort of variety you get out of just 6 basic monsters, check out our interactive online demo. In the final game we estimate there will be 120 basic monsters, which gives us a total of 120², or 14,400, unique fusions. If you include all of the bootlegs as well–rare monsters with alternative palettes, types and learnsets–the total comes to… a lot more: 2.8 million. (Caveat: specific numbers are quite likely to change before release!)

Big numbers are all well and good, but what does fusion actually mean to the gameplay?

Fusion works like a temporary evolution during battle. After transforming your player character and companion into monsters, you can fuse them into a single battler! For the remainder of the battle (or until you un-fuse) the two characters work as one, with dual typing, combined stats, and access to both sets of moves.

Fusion works in tandem with several other systems in the game:

• Relationships
• Action points
• Procedural bosses

Relationships

When you battle in Cassette Beasts, you’re not fighting alone. There are several companion characters you can meet and travel with. By completing personal tasks for your companion you can improve your relationship with them. The strength of your relationship determines whether you can fuse, and how strong your fusion is!

In fact, Fusion Power, the most powerful attack in the game, can only be used by maxing out your relationship and then fusing. Fusion Power’s exact effects vary depending on which two monsters you’ve combined.

Action points

In a lot of turn-based RPGs, attacks cost a certain amount of a resource to use. This resource is often called something like stamina, MP or PP. Designers use these costs to encourage you to do some tactical decision making. Spamming your highest-power attack every time is boring, after all! Unfortunately, the designers are not always successful at achieving this.

In Pokémon, PP doesn’t matter at all unless you’re in a long dungeon or facing the Elite Four. Even then, recent games are so generous with Ethers and Elixirs that you don’t ever have to worry about running out of PP. During the story, it’s pointless to use anything other than your highest-power damaging moves.

Games with MP systems often run into this too. Eventually you level up enough that your MP limit or your MP regeneration rate is so high that you never need to use anything other than your highest power spell. Instead of giving you more options and more challenging tactical decisions, the game effectively takes options away as you progress because using anything other than your highest-power attack is pointless.

To work around this, some developers add cooldowns on top of MP or PP systems, but IMHO this is inelegant. It can be needlessly tiresome to plan several turns ahead when you have to consider cooldowns as well as points.

For Cassette Beasts, we’re taking inspiration from board games–we’ve chosen a variation on Action Points.

Battle starts with every character on 0 AP. At the start of each round everyone gains 2 AP (up to their maximum). Then, they can all choose one move to use that turn. Each move costs a certain amount of AP: lower-power attacks are cheap (or free), while high-power ones can cost as much as 10 AP.

Every turn you’re faced with the decision of whether to save or spend your AP. Balanced around AP like this, every move in the game has its place in the battle system. There are no useless moves, because the weaker, cheaper moves let you save up AP for your big attacks.

A legitimate criticism of AP systems is that they can make battles slow. This would be a major problem for a game that bombards the player with repetitive random encounters, but that’s not our intent anyhow.

So anyway, when you’re fused you gain the same total amount of AP (i.e. 4 AP) each turn. However since it’s all on one character now, you build up points towards your most powerful attacks quicker.

Fusing lets you unleash more powerful attacks sooner. It’s such a little thing, but it makes a huge change to the feeling of fusion battles!

Procedural bosses

The player character is not the only one who can use fusion–certain NPCs can as well! And one plan we have for late- and post-game content involves creating boss fights out of fused monsters.

(We have pretty wild ideas for non-procedural bosses too. If you’ve played our other game Lenna’s Inception and liked the bosses there, you won’t be disappointed!)

Anyway, that’s all I want to share for now. Let us know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to share this post if you enjoyed it! ❤︎

We’ve covered the Fusion System already, which allows you to combine any two monster forms into a more powerful form during battle. Now I want to give you some detail on the chemistry system in Cassette Beasts.

So what is chemistry? In Cassette Beasts, chemistry replaces the systems of type effectiveness you typically see in RPGs. Instead of providing numerical damage multipliers, type match-ups generate different status effects. These status effects can be beneficial to you if you get it right, or to your opponent if you get it wrong!

Type match-ups

In Cassette Beasts, every monster has one elemental type, and every attack has one elemental type. There are 14 types in Cassette Beasts, which you can see in the type chart below. Some of them might feel familiar, while others might seem bizarre!

Plastic and Glass types are as you’d expect; they’re made possible by the chemistry system. ‘Astral’ is our paranormal / space / cosmic type. And as for Glitter, read on…

So how do you read this chart? Basically, after an attack lands on a monster, the type of the attack and the defending monster are compared. One of four things can happen, depending on the color of the cell:

• Green: the defender gets a buff (the attack was ‘weak’ against them). A buff is a positive status effect, which might increase the defender’s stats, or give it a temporary immunity or healing effect.
  Example: using a Fire-type move on a Water-type monster gives it a shroud of steam that passively heals it.
• Red: the defender gets a debuff (the attack was ‘strong’ against them). A debuff is a negative status effect, which might do something like reduce the defender’s stats or drain its health over several turns.
  Example: using a Water-type move on a Fire-type monster extinguishes it, reducing its Melee and Ranged Attack stats.
• Yellow: the defender is transmuted, changing its type. Different chemistry will apply the next time they’re hit!
  Example: using a Fire-type move on a Plastic-type monster melts the monster, transmuting it into Poison-type.
• Blank: no extra effect.

To gain the advantage in battle, you’ll want to land as many debuffs onto your opponent as possible, while avoiding having debuffs placed onto you. You can change your type (through chemistry, switching form, or using certain moves) to trick your opponent into giving you a buff. Or in a pinch, you can deliberately hit your ally with a weak attack to give them a quick buff!

Understanding the system

If you’re used to Pokémon, and expect to understand the entirety of the system from the beginning of the game, it might seem daunting to have to learn every individual status effect that can be produced! That’s because in Pokémon, in order to battle competently, you do have to master the type effectiveness system–i.e. learn it entirely. In Cassette Beasts, competence and mastery are two separate steps.

In Cassette Beasts you can competently use the chemistry system by just knowing where the green, red and yellow cells are on the type chart. However there is always a tactical advantage to be gained by mastering it–learning each individual effect. This might only come to you much later in your experience with the game!

And of course the game helps you find your way around this by previewing the effects of your attack.

I can’t be the only person to find a game boring after I’ve learned how its systems works. Anything that delays mastery until later can only help the game keep some level of mystery. 😉

Typeless moves

OK, I lied earlier when I said each monster and each move has only one type. Fusions have two types (although this might change), and certain common moves are typeless.

Typeless moves such as Smack, the basic melee attack, and Spit, the basic ranged attack, inherit their typing from the monster that uses them. So a Fire-type monster using Smack deals Fire damage, while a Water-type monster using Smack deals Water damage.

This adds a little more versatility to the chemistry system. You can change your own type to better land debuffs on your opponent, or defensively change your opponent’s type to turn their attacks into ones that deliver you buffs.

Glitter type?? WTF

If you’re wondering what that row of yellow in the type chart is, here’s a hint: think about what happens to things you touch for weeks after you get hit with a glitter bomb. Yes, that’s right, they get covered in glitter too!

That’s how it works in Cassette Beasts: anything you hit with a Glitter-type attack becomes Glitter-type itself. The column of yellow, where Glitter is defending does the opposite: Glitter-type monsters change type to whatever the type of the attack they received was.

There are no natural Glitter-type monsters, and there is only one Glitter-type attack: Glitter Bomb. This is a move you might use when the chemistry system puts you at a severe disadvantage against your opponent, or if you just like making a sticky, sparkly mess and irritating everybody.

Glass actually is another fun type, but we’ll go over that another time.

Chemistry vs damage multipliers

I mentioned delaying mastery as one advantage of this chemistry system, but there actually several reasons we’ve decided to try this out:

• It helps give certain types and monsters strong personality. Glass, Glitter and Plastic all have really strong personalities thanks to the mini mechanical narratives that can be told with chemistry effects.
• It encourages synergistic strategies with your partner. With the right choice of types, monsters and moves you gain access to a huge set of status effects to inflict, even though you might only have a few moves between you!

And finally, a lot of the decisions we’re making for the battle system come down to whether it helps us balance the battle system in the context of an open world game. Frequently, we’re finding that part of the answer is shifting slightly away from purely vertical (i.e. numerical) progression, and towards systems mastery and horizontal systems of progression.

Anyway, I hope that all makes sense, and sounds interesting to you. Let us know what you think in the comments. And don’t forget to share this post if you like it! 🙏