Dev Update & Character Design Part 3 – Skins

It’s time for another dev blog post! Today’s post is a particularly visual one! Besides updating you on what we’ve been doing this week, the main topic of this post is character skins, as part of the series about character design (last one for now!).

The past week has been filled with a lot of development. We’ve worked hard on improving various game features and fixed a ton of bugs. In addition, last Wednesday, we ran our very first external playtest! It was a full day with a total of 20 external testers, who had never laid eyes on Ganbatte before. I’ll dedicate a brief update on how this went (and what it looked like) next week. We also recorded a video of our first gameplay demo, and we’ll be sure to share that soon. It’s about time we finally share some actual footage of the game 😀 !

Fittingly, on Thursday night we had an amazingly tasty all-you-can-eat-sushi dinner at our local sushi restaurant, here in Coimbra. And it was a special occasion: the end of the summer internship program. That’s right, today marks the final day of the Mimicry 2017 summer internship. A crazy 3-month ride that flew by. José and Pedro: we love you, you guys are amazing, this is not the end, this is only the beginning! Are you curious to know what it was like for the interns? We’ll be posting their personal reflections here on the dev blog, in the coming days.

On to the last part of this post: SKINS! In Ganbatte players will be able to customize the look of their cat, choosing from a set of pre-selected color schemes that we call skins. Skins are cosmetic, and they modify your cat’s appearance, not its abilities. We’re thinking about offering skins of various rarity levels, starting with a set of default “common” skins and (to be considered!) rare, epic and legendary skins, but that’s still to be decided. For Ganbatte’s initial early access release we plan to include a total of 5 skins that you can unlock by playing the game. The skins are inspired by various real-world cat types, with unique colors for the cat’s coat as well as the eyes.

Which skin do you like best? And do you prefer the lower version (with the belly!) or the top one? Leave it in the comments below!

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading. And keep an eye on our social media channels for the upcoming posts about the playtest, the gameplay demo video and the reflections on the summer internship.

– Thomas