Malcolm has been RuneScape gold playing RuneScape since childhood, and has also dabbled in the top idle games, such as Clicker Heroes, Cookie Clicker and NGU Idle. Although he liked them, he felt the genre could be doing something that was more enjoyable in a manner similar to Jagex's top RPG.
"So I set out to design my own game and never thought that it would actually be launched, let alone becoming so popular," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I wanted to create something completely different from the existing idle game mold with a feature-packed game and allowed players to have a real options in how they wanted to go about their lives, rather than just increase numbers in a continuous cycle.
After playing with an idea few minutes in the privacy of my own home, I started meshing ideas and mechanics from classic MMOs along with the well-known idle game strategy, creating something that can be played at leisure, in the car, and fit it into the player's hectic life."
He continues: "While the numbers and stats don't make up the majority of players are most interested in when playing MMOs It is the one that people who are devoted fans tend to be drawn to once the exploration is over. As it's often so central to what long-term players focus on it's logical to incorporate this into a core part of the game's design. Plus it meshes very well with the common design elements found in the majority of games played in idle mode."
In his quest to draw inspiration from other MMOs The structure and structure of RuneScape was one that he analyzed particularly closely, building out its world Melvor Idle as a parallel universe to the 20-year-old RPG. "RuneScape became a key basis for the game as it was such a crucial game for me," he explains."
Like many people OSRS GP I first started playing RuneScape because the majority of my peers were playing it. Its being an online game was a huge part of this, that easy entry point with RuneScape's extensive branching depth and complexity are what attracted me back to it for so long -- something I wanted to emulate with Melvor Idle."