The developers behind Mineko’s Night Market, a cute upcoming game based off of Japanese folklore and the famous Japanese ‘cat islands’, gave Twitch viewers a look at the game’s progress and its many, many cats.
Yesterday, at 2 and 9 PM PST, developers Meowza and Kukubee gave Twitch viewers look at the full demo of their new game. Mineko’s Night Market is a game where players control a titular young girl who lives on an island with her father and a large variety of other islanders. Described on the website as “…a game about crafting crafts, eating eats, and catting cats,” the major gameplay loop involves collecting or crafting items to sell at a Japanese-style night market every Saturday night. The gameplay brings games such as Animal Crossing and the Harvest Moon series to mind. During the stream, the developers also explained some other topics on how the game worked, such as:
- Time: Every day is divided into sixteen time slots, four each for morning, afternoon, evening, and night. You advance them by transitioning between screens, so you can spend all of a real-life day petting in-game cats, and it won’t advance the day, so long as you stay in one area.
- The conversation system: The game lets you choose one of four greetings (based off of being more/less formal) for people, with each person liking a different greeting.
As well as the above features, the demo showed the viewers things like the crafting system, government agents who are worryingly cool with potentially committing infanticide, and, most importantly of all, a Dad Nickname Generator, which lets Mineko’s dad give her a variety of cute nicknames. My personal favorite from the stream was ‘buttbutt’.
The developers noted that a good deal of the things seen in the demo were placeholder or not fully fleshed out. The music at the night market, for example, was one, although I honestly couldn’t tell that it was placeholder because it was very good. Those who receive a newsletter from the official website would also see that the bartering system when you run your night market stall was different from the in-game demo, as the newsletter version shows Mineko’s face changing depending on how cheap or expensive you made the item for the customer.
Between the two demo showcases, the official Twitter for Mineko’s Night Market gave an important announcement:
Mineko’s Night Market is slated for release late 2018. You can watch the video of the first showcase below.