Hello folks!
Wow! Thank you so much for all your questions! We had so many to answer that this will be a huge post, so strap in and let's take this journey of answers together!
Pombomb thanks you too! He worked so hard delivering all your messages, and we promise he'll get all the treats and pets he wants.
General
Various: When is it coming out?
Tom: It’ll come out when it’s finished 🙂
Jay: Keep your eyes peeled for more information soon!
Various: How long would it take for the average person to complete the game?
Tom: Most first-time playthroughs take about 30 hours. However the open nature of the game can make this vary by quite a lot. I know some people who played for 50+ hours before beating it the first time. On subsequent playthroughs, when you know where various important things are, and when you know your way around the battle system, it isn’t too difficult to get it down to 10 hours, and I'm sure speedrunners will get it down to sub-3 hours.
Ace Nhiyr: Will there be any secret linkages between Lenna’s Inception [Bytten Studio’s previous game] and Cassette Beasts?
Tom: 😉
Jay: You may have noticed a couple of nods in the demo - I wouldn’t want to spoil any further ones!
winfrey: How long have you been working on this game?
Tom: We’ve been working on it since late 2019, and first announced it in May 2020. Games take a lot of time to develop. If it seems like it's taking Cassette Beasts a long time to come out, it's only because we announced it so early!
Raven: Did you ever steal a traffic cone?
Tom: We’ve all done things we regret.
Why were cassettes the medium you picked for this story?
Tom: Jay should answer this one!
Jay: I think when you’re trying to explain a fantastical concept such as “transforming into monsters”, you need to have something “real” to anchor that to. Popular media series’ that involve monster capturing and transforming all understand this - if you can imagine yourself with a magic deck of cards, or a morphing watch or belt, then you can start to properly imagine yourself doing it. The cassette tape fulfilling this function was the result of exploring what “real world” item we could use as the foundation for monster transformation. They’re something a lot of people are familiar with, but are also cool and retro!
Lewis: How will you celebrate the game’s release?
Tom: Personally, I’m going to take a few days off to spend time with my girlfriend. It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper holiday. I think I’ll drink a lot of beer too. Cheers!
Jay: I’m going to go outside and touch grass.
Solidwake: Have you had the game playtested by others or is that something you might consider?
Tom: Yes, the game has been playtested by our friends and family, as well as Raw Fury’s testing team, their gamebreakers group, and the localisation team. They’re all under NDA though, so don’t start asking them about it. 🤫
caiman: Are performance targets for the console versions finalized?
Tom: Our targets are 60 FPS on Xbox Series and Steam Deck (as well as Windows/Linux for sufficiently powerful hardware), and a minimum of 30 FPS for Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
Shikikan_Dawn: Will the soundtrack be available on Steam? It's lovely.
Jay: Yes!
Prof.McStevie: I'd love to know why you chose this particular art style, it's very pleasing and wanted to know the reasoning behind it :O
Jay: I’m a pixel artist by trade, so me working on a monster-collecting RPG was always going to involve pixel art. I was also really interested in the “HD pixel art” look that games have been starting to explore in recent years, so making that jump to 3D for the world made sense. It’s the first 3D game I’ve worked on!
@EnigmonOfficial: Who did the assets for the world and are they available for work ? I love the 3D world with 2d sprites. It's very distinct and stands out.
Jay: That was me - unfortunately I’m busy making Cassette Beasts!
Monsters
Various: How many monsters are there?
Tom: There are 120 regular monsters (including evolutions), giving 14400 fusions. If you want to count bootlegs (rare palette- and type-swapped monsters) as well, there are 1800 monsters and about 3.2 million fusions.
Hubertdradon: Are there any predatory bird monsters?
Tom: It depends what you count as a predatory bird monster. I don’t think there are any monsters based specifically on predatory birds, but there are definitely a few bird-like monsters you could consider predatory!
Zyries: Were there ever any types you guys scrapped because they didn’t fit or other reasons? Or any interactions between types you had to scrap?
Tom: We locked the types down in late 2019, before we even started working on Cassette Beasts full-time. But there were some type-related ideas for potential monster-collection games we discussed before we finally settled on Cassette Beasts. One was subtypes, where there are several different variants of each type. So for a basic Plant-type, there would be a few subtypes like Fungi, and Wood. All Plant subtypes would have advantages and disadvantages over the same types, but the buffs and debuffs you’d get were different. I think this would have been too complicated in Cassette Beasts. And anyway, something with that many types wouldn’t leave you with many species of each subtype.
I’m sure I pitched various other weird types for Cassette Beasts to Jay at some point. In the past I worked on a little procedural generation prototype called Kirigami Beasts, which generates monsters with types like Paper, Rock, Scissors, Glitter, Glue, Tiny and Giant. I like weird types, and I'm glad we found a way to get Glitter, Plastic, and Glass into Cassette Beasts.
As for type interactions, they’ve been through a lot of iterations. Pretty much all the buffs/debuffs have changed at some point. At one point we planned for Air-type to disperse and remove Glitter-type, but we felt like it would be better to keep the interactions of a rare and unusual type like Glitter consistent.
winfrey: Was it hard coming up with all the beasts’ names?
Tom: Most beasts’ names haven’t been too hard to come up with! Often it was the case that Jay would draw a design, and I’d have 5 pun names for it in about 10 minutes. There were a few weird coincidences where Jay had designed a monster that I assumed was based on a pun name he came up with because the pun was so apparent. The Plant-type lion monster Dandylion is one example. There is no other name that monster could have had, but somehow Jay didn’t have any particular name in mind when he’d designed it!
Jay: Naming things is our greatest talent as a team: making Cassette Beasts was merely an excuse to come up with hundreds of puns.
🐸💦: Any unexpected inspirations or influences along the way? Would love to hear any oddball or surprising media outside of monster taming / creature collecting that helped shape Cassette Beasts!
Tom: Great question, there’s a lot! If you want the really oddball stuff - I’m an occasional lucid dreamer, so I get a lot of my ideas by mining dreams. That’s actually where the idea of copying monster forms to transform into came from: I had a dream about travelling around an island with a friend, where I'd transform into monsters for battle, and “learn” new forms by observing wild monsters. Jay and I had discussed transformation before that, but up until that point it had always been one fixed monster form per character - you’d have to recruit a new human character to be able to use their monster form in battle. Jay, influenced by Kamen Rider, later suggested doing the copying and transforming with physical cassette tapes, and Cassette Beasts was born!
Another oddball source of inspiration for me was the story “The Beatles Never Broke Up”, about a man who in 2009 hit his head and woke up in another world where the Beatles still exist, where people still use analogue technology, and where parallel universe travel is commonplace. I'm sure you can see some similarities with Cassette Beasts here!
And of course various aspects of the game have been influenced by more normal things! The presentation of Archangels in Cassette Beasts is inspired a little by Madoka’s witches. And the way the relationship system ties into fusions is heavily influenced by Steven Universe, which we’re both fans of.
The AP system in Cassette Beasts is taken from board and card games. Both of us had noticed that the constraints on board games pushed their designers to really refine resource management systems. I think that AP is both simpler and more tactical than, for example, standard JRPG MP meters - and it lets us design powerful moves that would be difficult to balance otherwise.
Jay: Off the top of my head, an influence on the broader themes of the game (as well as the strange English surrealism of the setting) takes some inspiration from comic author Grant Morrison, whose stories often explore the nature of fiction, multiple realities, and their influence on one another.
Prinny: I'm curious if you would add heights in comparison to your player (a human) mainly for fan art/drawing reasons for better scaling
Tom: You can see how tall a human is in comparison to monsters at the start of battle! When you enter battle you’re in human form for a couple of seconds before you transform.
Jay: In our key art we draw monsters slightly smaller than they are compared to humans in-game… I think this is more because a 6-foot tall Pombomb wouldn’t be as cute as a dog sized one.
RetQuetzin: Were there any monster fusions you wanted to handcraft or are they all handled by the procedural system?
Tom: I think it would have been a waste to hand-design a subset of fusions. Handcrafted fusions would have taken about as much time to sprite and animate as a large regular monster, so each one of them would reduce the total number of monsters we could have in game. On top of that, out of the 14 thousand procedural fusions, there’d only be a slim chance a player would come across one of the handcrafted ones.
Gameplay
Little_JonS: Very, very excited for this game! Just wondered what you had planned for anything post-game?
Dnlsokoloff: Is there going to be a post-game, single player arena/battle frontier of some sort where we'll still be able to put our beasties to the test?
Jay: There’s post-game content for sure, but it might be a bit different from what you might expect based on other games in this genre. We generally try to design the content that best fits the world of Cassette Beasts.
Tom: There is a pretty substantial post-game quest that introduces new monsters, characters and bosses. I estimate that the post-game adds 10-20 hours. That's not even including the randomisation and permadeath options that get unlocked for repeat playthroughs.
Akarnor: Will there be new stickers [in the full release of the game that are not in the demo]?
Tom: We have a lot of ideas for new moves and status effects that won’t make it into the 1.0 full release. If we get the opportunity, we’d love to add more after the game’s release.
Ryterex: Are there any plans for post-launch updates?
Tom: Can’t say at the moment. When we have something to announce you’ll hear about it.
Jay: The kind of support we’re able to provide will depend on how well the game performs. You know what that means: time to bother your friends and make them follow the game!
Shawn B: Will there be any online multiplayer? I know there is couch co-op but I'd like to be able to play with people who aren't right next to me as well.
Tom: There won’t be any online multiplayer at launch - we’re developing Cassette Beasts predominantly as a single-player experience. As for after launch, I can’t say for sure, but it’s a possibility if the release goes well.
C-Vale: Are there moves/status effects not on the wiki?
Tom: Only the unobtainable boss moves.
Crackerbones: Will there be an item to increase bootleg odds later in the game?
Tom: In the post-game there’s a valuable consumable that can be used to find bootlegs of certain species or types. In a previous blog post we mentioned Rogue Fusions: tough fused wild monsters that have a higher than normal bootleg rate. There are several kinds of Rogue Fusions, some of which get unlocked late in the post-game, and the most challenging of them give the best odds for bootlegs.
I like that the most efficient way to get bootlegs in Cassette Beasts is to use the battle system.
William Syler: Are there mechanics, gameplay considerations, or ideas that you’re really excited about / proud of in Cassette Beasts? Tell us more about them!
Tom: There are a few that I can’t talk about yet! But I can say I’m pleased with the battle system. Demo players are already praising its depth, and I’m very much looking forward to the reaction to the Ranger Captain boss fights. Each Captain specialises in a particular strategy to show off some of the things you can do in the battle system. In the post-game they hone their strategies further. It’s gonna be fun!
a_galvantula: How did you come up with the idea for some of the loading screen tips?
Tom: Do you mean the loading screen text that says like “Directing Traffikrab”, “Seeing all the Allseer”, etc.? We didn’t come up with this idea, it was shamelessly stolen from the Sims. Back in the day, the Sims used to display nonsense loading screen text to make loading screens mildly entertaining (“Reticulating splines” is the famous one). I’ve always thought this was a fun idea, and I don’t know why more games don’t do this.
Solidwake: How many open world areas should we expect to be able to freely roam around in?
Tom: The island of New Wirral is one large open map, about twice the size of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There are some invisible walls you can run into if you exploit physics during the tutorial, but after that the only limits are your knowledge of the battle system and your physics skills!
NCrafters: Local co-op in the demo had player two pretty "handcuffed" to player one. Are there any interesting features or mechanics planned for this mode to make the experience a little more flexible?
Tom: Having the two characters travel together is kind of the point. If they could go off and do separate things, there wouldn’t be many meaningful ways the players could interact. It would end up feeling like two single-player games. There are games that can support independent exploration in local co-op, but the mechanics of turn-based RPGs don’t lend themselves to it very well.
ShuddersGist: What's the friendship/love mechanic gonna be like? How will it affect the game?
Tom: You can get closer to the companions by completing their quests and by battling alongside them. Levelling up your relationship unlocks fusion, as well as a special move called Fusion Power, which does different things depending on which species were fused. And of course the closer you are, the higher the stats of your fusions are!
Each time you level up your relationship with a character, you learn a bit more about them via a little cutscene that plays. There’s also a romance option when you’ve maxed out the relationship meter - but it’s completely optional and doesn’t affect the gameplay.
Nanite: Are there any plans for challenge modes?
Tom: There are permadeath and randomiser modes unlocked once you beat the story. As for other challenges - we’re going to wait and see what challenges and rules the community comes up with!
That’s it for today! Missed your chance to ask us something? Not to worry as we'll be doing another Q&A closer to release. Come chat with us on our official Discord! You can always follow us on Twitter, too!
Until next time!
Beast 
Fire 
Ice 
Lightning 
Plant 
Air 
Water 
Earth 
Poison 
Metal 
Plastic 
Astral 
Glass 
Glitter 
