New Meat
A downloadable game
HEY, THIS GAME'S GETTING A REMASTER!
That's right! I'm currently in the process of giving this game a total audio-visual-gameplay-ual makeover! The new version of the game is going to have all-new monster art, original and kind-of-original music, and lots of new surprises! You can check it out on my website here: https://www.alexlemley.com/new-meat
(The remaster will be its own launch, and sold for actual money! But if you can't wait, check out the original version of the game below!)
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New Meat is a fast-paced horror-comedy roguelite about burgers, monsters and dead-end jobs. You play as Niko, the new hire at a remote burger establishment named Burger Site, and it's your job to keep the freezers stocked with meat for the hungry customers to munch on. How do you do that? Simple! Just head down to the horrible sprawling flesh-dungeon underneath the building and blast a few of the roaming monsters into delicious meaty chunks! Just make sure they don't take a bite out of you, first.
Survive five days of mayhem to earn your place as a permanent hire, and if you do really well, possibly even more. Anything can happen in the Meat Dungeon, and there are lots of secrets to find...though you might not like what you see.
New Meat is a full and complete experience. It's my first ever full-game release, in fact. That said, it's in an early-access state at the moment. Expect plenty of content, balance, and bugfixing updates going forward, and remember that your feedback is ALWAYS appreciated!
FEATURES:
-A heavily randomized dungeon made entirely in RPG Maker! How is that possible? Play the game and see, because it...would take a while to explain. From the monsters to the hazards to the equipment, every run is a VERY different experience.
-Every stat counts! Your character stats aren't just for fighting. They help with dungeoneering, too! Raise your Attack to more easily break open barrels and chests. Raise your Defense to reduce damage from hazards, or your Agility to gain a chance to dodge them altogether. Think Luck is useless? Higher Luck gets you more AND BETTER loot from chests!
-A unique progression system! Some roguelites let you continually build up your stats between runs, while others are one-and-done. New Meat combines these two formats in a unique way, taking place over five days and allowing you to build up your stats more and more with each passing day. But, Day Five is the cutoff, and after that you're judged and start the whole week again. It's a hybrid system that should appeal to every kind of roguelite fan!
-Many endings, many secrets! New Meat may appear to be a simple, almost arcade-y romp, but there’s a mystery bubbling beneath its surface. What is the dungeon? What are these monsters? Is it really safe to be serving this meat to people? It will take more than expert dungeoneering to solve this one. Poke at the edges, consider the clues, and remember there’s just as much to be learned in failure.
WHAT'S HERE:
-120 Equipment pieces with unique abilities, making for tons of build combinations!
-6 Weapons, each with very different playstyles and unique upgrade trees for even more wildly specialized builds!
-A nonspecific number of mysterious "Curios," strange objects that further change your game by giving you new passive and active effects!
-42 Weird, meaty enemies drawn with the help of Google's "Chimera Painter" program!
-9 Tricky bosses, plus a very menacing final boss! Not everyone will make it all the way to her...
-11 Endings! This game tracks your progress closely and judges you carefully. There are many ways your first week on the job can play out. In some of the endings, you even survive!
WHAT'S COMING:
More endings, secrets, and dungeon features are planned! There's already a lot here, but the game is specifically designed as a framework to make adding new elements as simple a process as possible!
Also, consider any graphical or sound elements to be subject to change. Much of this game was made using RPG Maker's stock asset library combined with my own Photoshop skills, but I have plans to reach out to artists to fill out the game's visuals and music as early-access progresses. (Don't worry, I'll pay them.)
Download
Development log
- The Rainbow of Death UpdateNov 17, 2022
- The Boss Appreciation Day UpdateNov 01, 2022
- Midnight Bugfix Update!Oct 28, 2022
- HOTFIX ALERT: New Meat has been updated!Oct 28, 2022
- New Meat is Live!Oct 27, 2022
Comments
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Cool to see that you're putting out balance updates already, be interesting to replay this in a few weeks.
With playing a bunch of biopunk/meatpunk genre games lately I have been struck with some minor inspiration so I did a quick rough clatterbleg sketch.
Going to make it an imgur link due to the obvious body horror / NSFW:
https://imgur.com/a/0Edfaq1
This kind of stuff is basically the opposite of my genre (e.g. pretty anime ladies) but it was an interesting exercise.
Wow! That’s amazing! Thanks so much for this! Always love to see my weird doodles turned into something that actually looks cool!
Future updates might not come as fast, but they’ll also probably be bigger. This was mostly to put the existing balance closer to where I want it, so going forward I can focus on adding new stuff.
Ran through the main gameplay, was nice to see how many branches of ending there is. Still got plenty of endings I haven't found which is cool.
Few more thoughts for your ongoing development:
- Since you're following a roguelike style design, maybe remove saving or make it progress only (delete on death). When I got low on HP there were Noita-style decisionss to make about pushing one more room (where the wrong kind of encounter would be fatal), but if you're only risking progress since last save it doesn't feel as significant.
- HP management is good except for hearts, they are too easy to get and work as renewable full heals. Maybe change them to a finite resource (cannot be renewed) which leaves you at 1hp so it's only life insurance? The fountain giving a finite number of full heals per day feels like enough as it is. This plays into a lot because there's less of an incentive to stack AGI to avoid trap damage when you can just face tank it, for example.
- Stacked food buffs are gamebreaking, maybe limit each item to 1 stock or make them non-stacking, Monster Hunter style? All other balance considerations feel secondary when the player might have 500att if they stack food.
Little bug for you too, Natalie's day 5 NPC is still present in her office in the normal ending while her end sequence NPC is present in the staff room.
Thanks for the feedback!
Just so you know, I’m working on the next update now, and I realized that this build actually has a significant bug in it that relates to a lot of the problems you mentioned.
See, bosses are supposed to scale in difficulty the more you’ve defeated, but in this build they…don’t. All the bosses are stuck at “Level 1” as it were. Because of this, something I intended to be the game’s primary mode of pushback against the player doesn’t exist.
I’m playtesting the new update now and the bug is fixed. Hopefully it will provide a more interesting challenge. I might not have caught the bug without your feedback, though, so thanks a bunch!
Managed to get through with the catalyst fight ending and I had a pretty good time -
I think it would be good if there could be a save point added right before the boss fight as I ended up losing my progress on that day - still want to play the other endings.
Otherwise, gameplay wise I think I found:
- Length of the combat being aimed for 2-3 turns makes status effect items a bit harder to get a benefit from - since it will usually take the same number of turns to end a combat
- Energy management might be a bit easy with every buff item also restoring energy, as it's possible to bruteforce all the gold chests etc with them
- Ambush attacks combined with ATT stacking is pretty overpowered as you can generally beat every combat in the first turn with the ninja chainsaw and its rip and tear attack (including the final boss)
Has been entertaining though - I'll be going back for a normal non-endboss playthrough later.
Thanks so much! I already have ideas for some of these issues. One of the first big changes I have planned is that the late-game bosses are going to get much, much more health to make first-turn kills a lot harder (and therefore glass cannon builds a lot riskier). I also plan to add more Curios that aren't energy-restorers to the pool, so it'll be less likely you'll be fully decked out with them by the end.
Glad to hear you liked it! Didn't expect someone to beat the final boss so quickly!
Hey dude, been following your dev on this one off and on so keen to give it a try. I think you might have missed a file out in the game files though - whatever "Haato.png" is meant to be. I had to create a filler file for it in the pictures dir as it was throwing a bunch of error messages otherwise.
Oh no! Thanks so much for letting me know! I've uploaded a new version that should have every file you need!