Despite our silence, the team has been working on MF throughout 2020 / 2021. The launch of 2019 was exciting, seeing over 200 players log in on launch day, with hundreds more logging in over the following days. We have built great friendships with many of you, some of whom we've now known for years! MF has always been a friendly, welcoming community and it's held a soft spot in our hearts. In light of the post-launch issues, we immediately started discussing what features were missing and what we could do better. It was clear the 1.0 experience, while fun, lacked the key gameplay loops to keep our players engaged. Ultimately, we decided to bring the public server down, take a step back and refocus at our own pace. While the server was down, the team kept revisiting the project, contributing bits and pieces here and there. There were nearly 200 code commits since then, some of which represent major features. We also spent some time fleshing out the design documents and gameplay systems, believing that 2.0 could be the version of MF we'd all hoped to play. The Roadmap When discussing what needed to change for 2.0, we all agreed the server needs replayable content. The players can explore and have fun on their own, but having endlessly replayable content to support that would be a gamechanger. We came up with two key systems - randomly generated dungeons and dynamic quests (more on these later). We also reflected on the existing systems, what went wrong and what worked well. We came up with a list of systems to completely redesign, including food, combat, progression, trade, and housing. The roadmap above represents a shortlist of key features we feel are necessary for a successful 2.0 launch: dungeons, progression, quests, trade, and housing. This is our milestone and we will not launch until we are happy with the state of these 5 areas. This is not an exhaustive list (there will be tens of additional new features), but it is a list we feel is crucial to MF's long-term success. The Path Forward Our development will take a more casual trajectory until 2.0 is ready. We will each contribute to the project as we can, in our spare time. This means there is no set date we are working towards, but rather a list of features we are targeting. While the development may take time, we hope to have an active relationship with our community and gather your feedback as we work on the systems. That would be invaluable in making sure the systems are fun and well thought out. Contributing As these features come online, we will be holding both internal and external testing sessions. If you are interested, we would appreciate you having a look at some of the features and helping us tweak the values behind them. Besides testing, some of the features (such as housing) are quite conceptual - we don't know what would work best. In this case, it would be amazing to hear what you would like to see. I will be posting separate threads over the coming weeks, detailing some of the systems and explaining our thought process behind them. Hopefully, this will drive some interesting discussion and ultimately can result in a better 2.0 experience!
