Dev Update #19 - What's Next?

Hey Everyone!

Last week was a big one - a Major Update that brought the game’s newest skill, Ranching! We’ve been hard at work squashing bugs and keeping the progress moving on all of the others skills, systems and content that’s in the works.

We’ve had a lot of great feedback on Ranching already, and we’re looking forward to even more as you all progress through the skill. We’ll be posting another survey focused on Ranching and the Major Update as a whole in the near future, but we’re also always reading your comments in Discord, via the Google Feedback Forms and on Patreon! 

We’ve already pushed many updates & fixes for the last Major Update, and we have some more on the way.

Now it's time to look at what’s planned for the next Major Update ?

❓What’s next for Melvor Idle 2?

Our next skill, and the focus of our next Major Update, will be Hunting!

The core concept of the skill is exactly what you’d expect - hunting a variety of prey to gather core resources required throughout the game! We’ll dive into a preview of Hunting closer to its release, once we’ve finished our internal playtesting. Today we wanted to talk a bit about why we’re focusing on Hunting next, and what that means for everything that’s coming after.

?Why Hunting?

We’ve locked in our direction for the next few updates, and Ranching and Hunting are part of that direction. We want to get as much content as possible into your hands ASAP, but one of the limitations we’ve consistently hit in planning and designing new skills is pretty simple:

They all need resources, and those resources aren’t available in the game yet.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to focus the majority of our efforts on rounding out the gathering skills for Melvor Idle 2. This doesn’t mean we’ve stopped or deleted all work on other skills (Coolrox is still working diligently on the underlying systems for Combat), but it does mean we’re moving them down the priority order.

Having all of the gathering skills in place gives us a much better base to work with for other content. If we’ve already figured out the teething issues with the resources, we’re able to implement everything that depends on them without worrying about that grind colouring the experience. 

We think this will be better for your experience as players, and better for us in the focused feedback we can get! It’s also helpful for us to design as lot of these gathering systems together - because they have similar mechanics, and lots of interactions, we can get much better results by keeping them all fresh in our minds.

Hunting will also be a primary source for Herb Seeds ?

? What else is planned for the next Major Update?

While Hunting is our main focus, that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing in the pipeline. Major Updates typically feature a variety of content outside of the headline items - the Ranching update also included a bunch of changes to farming, new cooking recipes, UI updates, changes to Crafting and Runecrafting, and more.

In a similar vein, while Hunting is our current main focus, we’re aiming to bring more new content or additions to the next Major update as well. Some key extras we are hoping to include are our first initial batch of Quests, Bank QoL, more Farming adjustments based on survey feedback, more UI reworks, and maybe an additional Skill such as Beastcrafting (which is directly tied to Hunter in terms of resources required).

As always, we don’t want to make any promises here - we won’t confirm the exact contents of the update until we’re 100% happy with them. We want to make sure every update brings something new, fun and interesting, while also improving the overall playing experience through new quality of life or stability improvements. We also want to make sure we’re taking our time to get everything we release to a state we’re happy with, and that we’re setting ourselves up well for the content that follows.

?Ranching & Major Update Recap

We’ve released 3 minor updates since the launch of Ranching last week focussed on fixing critical bugs and improving the overall experience of the update. You can view the updates and changelogs via Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/collection/1559522

There is feedback coming through for various aspects of Ranching and the content we added alongside it which has been noted and on the table for discussions. We are also hard at work with the extra planned content for Ranching (new Animals and other goodies) which we hope to add to the game soon.

And, as always, we’re still closely watching your feedback and bug reports - they’ve been a huge help so far, so please keep them coming!

?️ What the team have been working on 

Here’s what the team has been working on since our last post!

Development

Malcs:

• Dedicated lots of time to bug fixes and changes from the last major update.

• Began working on the Hunting prototype. Basic mechanics are already finished, with final mechanics being added this week ready for dev testing.

• Received the first batch of Side quests, and implemented them into the game. Still requires balance, testing and UI adjustments before it can be scheduled for release.

• Has continued work on the UI rework (details coming at a later date).

Coolrox:

• Full focus still on Combat systems, making great progress.

• Finished up the framework for item equipping.

• Reworked key systems (like the Bank’s core inventory system) to better support things like item filtering, which will be used heavily for our much-improved item equipping system.

• Additional work on the game’s build systems to help streamline releases

Game Design

Prat:

• Still mainly focused on Hunting! All content is already planned, with the bulk of the current effort now shifting to refining the skill’s progression and interactions. This involves so many little number adjustments and tiny mechanical changes.

• Similar work is also underway on Beastcrafting, which has most of its content already planned and ready to go.

Artwork

Tapi:

• Some additional artwork for Ranching (minor changes and variations for existing animals) 

• Lots of delicious new artwork for cooking! Look at these cakes (I’m hungry now)

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this dev update! We’re excited to keep adding more and more content to the game, and the upcoming gathering skills should be a great step in pushing us in that direction.

See you around! ?‍♂️

- Althalus