Many a video game has inspired an aspiring developer to make their own. But it’s rare to have a derivative work picked up by the company behind the original title.
This, however, was the case for Brendan Malcolm, the one-man team at Australian developer Games By Malcs, whose idle RPG Melvor Idle is being published by Jagex, the creator of RuneScape — a title that was core to Malcolm’s motivation behind his own project.
Melvor Idle strips away the graphics and 3D environments of RuneScape and similar MMOs and distills it down to a menu-based idle game, where players manage their skills, inventory and quests. Activating combat encounters and winning earns XP and loot that can then be invested into whichever skill tree or upgrades players choose, while repeating activities such as crafting or woodcutting yields their own benefits.
Malcolm has been playing RuneScape since his youth, and has also dabbled in many of the leading idle games, such as Clicker Heroes, Cookie Clicker and NGU Idle. While he enjoyed them, he felt the genre could be doing something more that would be satisfying in a similar way to Jagex’s flagship RPG.
Brendan Malcolm, Games By Malcs
“So, I decided to challenge myself to create my own, never really imagining it would end up being released, let alone become so popular,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz.
“I was trying to make something outside of the established idle game mould, something that was feature-rich, and gave players some real choice in how they wanted to progress, rather than just increase numbers on a constant treadmill. After toying with the idea for a while behind closed doors, I started meshing ideas and mechanics from classic MMOs with the popular idle game formula, creating something that could be enjoyed casually, on the go, and fit it into a player’s busy lifestyle.”
He adds: “While the numbers and stats stuff isn’t what all players enjoy the most about MMOs, it is what the hardcore fanbase tend to gravitate towards once the exploration is done. As it’s often so central to what the longest term players focus on, it made sense to adopt this as a core part of Melvor’s game design. Plus it meshes very well with design elements common in most idle games.”
While he took inspiration from other MMOs, the structure of RuneScape was one he followed particularly closely, building out the world of Melvor Idle as a parallel universe to the 20-year-old RPG.
“RuneScape became such a foundational touchstone for the game because it was such a foundational game for me,” he explains. “Like most people, I started playing RuneScape because most of my friends at the time were playing it. The fact that it was a browser-based game was a huge part of this, that low barrier to entry combined with RuneScape’s branching depth and complexity were what kept me coming back to it for a long time — which is something I wanted to replicate with Melvor Idle.”
“RuneScape became such a foundational touchstone for the game because it was such a foundational game for me”
Brendan Malcolm, Games By Malcs
With Malcolm quite open about his inspiration, word soon reached Jagex that a fan was building a game based upon its own MMO. A member of staff flagged it to management, with director of product management Chris Pfeiffer telling us his team was impressed by “how much had been achieved and how much of it aligned with RuneScape.”
“The vision for Melvor Idle is also completely in sync with our core values of what makes a living game — this was therefore a natural fit for us,” he says. “Furthermore, the idea of giving someone from our community this opportunity has really excited everyone in the business.”
Pfieffer and his colleagues tried Melvor Idle for themselves and enjoyed it — enough that they reached out to Malcolm to discuss the possibility of working together in early 2020.
“From just our initial conversations we learned that Brendan shares Jagex’s vision of community-driven games, and has done a great job of fostering a healthy and active community around Melvor Idle. It’s very rare to find such a natural fit when searching for publishing opportunities, but Brendan and Melvor Idle were exactly that, so we embraced the opportunity to support both him and the game wholeheartedly.
He adds: “We like to say that if RuneScape is the MMO that can be enjoyed while watching TV, Melvor is the idle game that can be enjoyed while playing RuneScape. Melvor Idle takes RuneScape’s core gameplay mechanics and condenses them down into bite-sized moments which can be enjoyed even when time is tight, so RuneScape players will feel at home in Melvor. But beyond that it is an exceptionally made idle game, and its emphasis on allowing players to choose their own path through the game helps it stand out from the glut of idle games that railroad players into just increasing a number indefinitely.”
Melvor Idle distills the structure of RuneScape into a simple id
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