Monsters of Mican is a brand new free roam blobber that will be releasing on Steam on March 25, 2024! You can wishlist it now in the Steam Store.
Monsters of Mican was originally released on the Epic Game Store in October 2023, but the developer has been hard at work making many improvements for the official Steam release.
We were excited to talk to the developer about the game. You can see the interview below!
Q: Tell us about Monsters of Mican, what is the general overview of your game?
A: Monsters of Mican: a whimsical journey of strategy and story where humor meets adventure in a world crafted from nostalgia and adoration of retro dungeon crawler classics!
Monsters of Mican sees the player exploring the dungeons beneath Spiny Island to uncover secrets both ancient and modern, concerning the nature of monsters, magic, and beyond.
Q: What game engine is the experience built on?
A: Unreal Engine 4
Q: Any big inspirations for the game?
A: My biggest inspiration of course was Might and Magic, a mix of the entire series’ style from 1 to 9. I got the idea for this world years ago from reading a text-based LP of the series by an author named Thuryl, and played around with UE4 for a long time before finally finding success on a project.
Some other inspirations for this particular game are the Dragon Quest series, specifically in regards to monster design and how you can chat and interact with monster’s you’ve recruited. Quest for Glory is another big inspiration in how interactions and puzzles are handled, with open-ended solutions for most of them.
Q: Any personal anecdotes you would like to share about the game?
A: The game was made initially with free Unreal Marketplace assets, and I was planning to just use them as placeholders. However, as I got more and more into development I found that I was doing so much to alter these assets (i.e. cutting and pasting portions of creatures onto other creatures) that I decided a major theme of the game will be Amalgamation.
One of the main story aspects therefore revolves around the “Amalgam Anomaly” which was an event long ago in the world of Mican which resulted in all of the strange and oddball creatures present within the game. You’ll learn more as you play, but suffice it to say the way in which the game was developed had a direct impact on the story of the game, which I think worked out for a really nice, cohesive package.
Q: How does combat work in Monsters of Mican?
A: Turn-based combat within the same world space as exploration. In essence, the combat style is very similar to that of Might and Magic 6-8, in the elective turn-based mode. Once you spot an enemy you’ll enter battle mode, in which you can move within a specific radius defined by your party’s speed, and then you and the enemies will take turns performing actions, with each action resulting in a “recovery” period.
Some enemies will have very quick recovery rates, and some items and skills can greatly increase your characters’ recovery rates, so how the turns unfold in combat vary greatly on each specific situation.
Q: Any other mechanics you are excited about / unique in your game?
A: There are a few unique mechanics that I really think work great. First is the magic points- rather than most RPGs of this style, MP works on an inverse scale. You start with 0 MP and as you use magical abilities your MP gauge increases. Once it reaches the maximum of the gauge you can still cast spells, but doing so will heavily damage your character proportionally to how much MP you are over the limit. This means spellcasters will never NEED to rely on standard melee or ranged attacks, but there will be situations where you’ll probably want to.
The second is the combat traits system. There are close to 80 unique “traits” which can be assigned to any enemy in the game. The traits affect how the enemies behave in battle. For instance, the “berserker” trait lowers all resistances by 50% but increases damage dealt by 50%. The “splitter” trait means the enemy splits into two (or more!) smaller enemies upon death. “Dodger” gives enemies a chance to dodge attacks, “gelatinous” gives them a chance for attacks to harmlessly bounce off, “hothead” makes increases their attack by 2% each time they are damaged, “phalanx” increased their resistances by 10% for each other enemy with the same trait, etc.
All of the enemies have a set of inborn traits, like Bonebums will always have “undead” (increased damage from sun-based attacks), but many can randomly have other traits assigned upon spawning. Some levels in the post-game specifically assign traits to enemies to fit a theme (like all Stone Golems in the “Rock Concert” challenge level have the “bouncer” trait, which knocks back the party when damaged.
Q: How big is your development team?
A: I made this game almost completely by myself! I’m very proud of that fact.
I had occasional input from friends, such as help with some statistics math, and a few suggestions for monsters and characters, as well as one friend who made 2 of the game’s music tracks. However, I did all the actual dev work alone.
Q: Differences from epic store release and steam release?
A: This upcoming release has a huge number of changes from the original Epic release. I’m calling it Version 2.0 for that reason. Most of the changes are related to the gamepad controls (the game now features full gamepad controls) and updated UI visuals. The character avatars being the main difference there, but plenty of other menus have been updated too. Once it launches on Monday March 25th the Epic version will also be updated with the same features.
There have also been a huge number of minor bug fixes and a lot of balancing changes.
Q: Future plans for the game? Future plans for you as a dev?
A: Glad you asked!! I have plans for one or two final updates before I move onto the sequel. I’ll briefly talk about both:
Updates- I’m already well into creating a Monster Arena, where you can bet on monster vs monster fights. Time/effort permitting I’ll also have a separate arena mode where you can enter your own monster buddies into the competition to climb the ranks and win the Monster Fight Championship! Second part of this update will be a bonus dungeon exploring the roots of the ancient facility at which much of the game takes place. This will include a new series of dungeons with a final final boss, and (ideally) an optional super-boss inspired by the Mega Dragon from Might and Magic!
Sequel- I actually started on the sequel before this game, the sequel being called Magic of Mican. It will be much more like traditional Might and Magic, with a full world map, a number of towns, a ton of NPCs, and about 30 dungeons. I’m hoping to revamp what I had done for that and start again after I finish the updates for this game.
The game is available on Epic Game Store right now, but the new 2.0 update will go live on March 25, 2024.
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/monsters-of-mican-02e3ee
Make sure to wishlist on Steam now!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2745660/Monsters_of_Mican/
