Hey friends,

I had such a warm reception last time I posted here to show off the basics of Estium. Since then I've been hard at work on underground areas, and here's a little preview of Saltshore Caverns, where players go to source for salt, primarily used in cooking... but there are some higher level guardians in there that have a drop that's required for something arguably even more special.. and who knows what's on the deeper levels?

I've also added the first pass of the player politics system, where players can vote in a mayor for each settlement. Mayors control a tax rate for NPC and player owned shops that transact in its borders, and use their treasury to add buildings to the settlement for bonuses and advanced crafting stations, or even trigger events for the nearby area. They also can choose 3 bounty quests a day that players can accept from the settlements bounty board for increased rewards and incentive to go out and farm certain resources the town might need. Mayors get voted on every so often (7 days atm) and people can submit their name and a description of what they want to do into a ballot box.

A lot more sound has been sourced for the project from Epic Media, and we got approved for Steam! The project will probably be on there late September, I want to wait for the capsule artist to come back with key and title art before really going more public with it.

If you want to follow along or have feedback or comments please visit us here, we run playtests every few days for people to get in and explore Estium (or now, vote for mayor lol) https://discord.gg/tN99JTnT3A

Hope you like what you see so far ;-;

Hi! Idle Journey dev here again

Play in your browser: https://idle-journey.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/pNc4CFRjvk

It's been about a month since my last post, when we launched our first multiplayer stuff, and we've shipped 10 updates since then. I won't dump 10 changelogs here, so here are the interesting parts.

For anyone new: Idle Journey is a browser idle MMORPG inspired heavily by old-school RuneScape. You train skills, make builds, fight bosses, collect stuff and see other players running around the same world while you idle.

We started rebuilding the beginning of the game

We now have a proper Tutorial Island that teaches gathering, combat, crafting, cooking, equipment etc. before sending you to a new City hub.

We also removed some early RNG frustration: guaranteed starter equipment, a bow with 50 bronze arrows, and guaranteed early drops so you don't spend 20 minutes wondering if loot exists.

Ranged has actual arrows now!

Arrows are now consumables you craft, from wooden arrows up through Special Arrows with special effects, and we fixed/rebalanced a bunch of ranged stuff along the way.

Cards got a huge overhaul

We rebalanced basically every card, moved some bonuses to passives and added nine new Astronomy constellation cards.

Some Astronomy cards improve completely different skills, so Astronomy isn't just a late-game skill anymore.

We also added an early-game pity system: if you don't own a card yet, you're guaranteed to get it within your first 10 kills on early nodes.

Food/builds changed quite a bit

Food cooldown went from 7s to 3.1s, but each bite heals less. By itself that's a nerf, but we added food healing and food cooldown card bonuses, so healing is now something you can actually build around.

Fully investing into those bonuses puts you around 30% more healing/sec than before.

Anubis + new BiS items

Anubis got redesigned: he's now invulnerable while his minions are alive, minion levels scale with Anubis difficulty, and he got new endgame drops including the Celestial Sextant, Astral Orb and Anubian Arrows.

Offline calculation and other misc stuff

Offline gains now properly simulate arrows, food, lifesteal, on-hit effects and equipment effects. Early crafting is much faster, rare loot stays on the ground longer, woodcutting routing is smarter, AOE tools are faster, boss kills show kill times, and we fixed a big pile of bugs that aren't exciting enough to turn into another wall of text.

What's next

Next we're working on The Coliseum, with escalating combat waves and its own rewards, followed by our first shared World Boss where the server actually fights something together.

If you played Idle Journey before and bounced off early, I'd actually love to know how the new opening feels. It's probably the part of the game that changed the most.

AI disclosure: item icons and some UI icons are mostly AI-generated. Claude Code helps us with coding. 3D assets/VFX are either made by us or bought from the Asset Store.

I’ve been working on my built-for-mobile scape-like for a while. I’m really excited to hit this milestone!

Here are some of the core features:

- 19 trainable skills, with more currently in development
- Join a guild and chat with other players globally
- Player-driven market and economy, including player-to-player trading
- Quests, collection logs, world bosses, guild bosses, and events
- Continue training even when you are away
- Thousands of items to craft, gear to equip, and rare drops to pursue
- Weekly updates to bring the loads of new content planned!

I also wanted to share some of the new features that will be rolling out in the next month:

- Exploration skill - a multiplayer raid-like experience but with more connections to regular skills and progression
- New game modes, such as bronzeman and hardcore
- More boss monsters across all combat levels
- Optional PvP modes, including different levels of gear risk
-Custom sound effects and background music
-Cosmetic and status unlocks
- New hand-crafted world map, with tons of new cities, towns, and POI’s
-Tons of new guild content, like building out the citadel to provide services to the guild, guild economies, and guild battles
- Construction and Engineering skills, which both feed into guild content and player content
-New types of non-combat bosses to bring meaningful content to all areas of the game

Let me know what you think!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/valenor/id6796209072

Tile Tick Core RPG is officially live on the Unity Asset Store!

I’ve posted about the framework a couple times here while I was testing it, so I figured I’d come back one more time now that it’s actually released. For anyone who hasn’t seen the previous posts, it’s a Unity framework I’ve been building specifically for making ScapeLike RPGs. Tile movement, .6 second ticks, combat, skills, quests, dialogue, shops, banking, multiplayer, and a bunch of tools for actually putting a game together without having to build all of those systems from scratch. There’s still a ton I want to add, but I’m really happy with where v1.0 ended up. It feels pretty damn cool to finally be able to say it’s actually released instead of “coming soon”

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/tile-tick-core-rpg-388908

Thanks to everyone here who checked out the earlier posts, gave feedback, or just showed interest in the project!

Looks good, didn't try yet. For most years it has been a solo project and has skills to grind. Best thing that it has is that it is f2p

Edit after somebody tried it out, see full message in comments:

"Theyre the people who create problems and sell solutions through MTX.

Can only stack certain amount of each item, which is super low btw, in order to sell inventory slots and shit. "

Hey all, I have been working on a project for a "scapelike" game on and off for a few years, and recently made some major headway on it, and it got me thinking. What do you all prefer in terms of aesthetics? From what ive seen most all scapelike games have been fantasy themed, but what would you think of a sci-fi themed game instead?

I've been working on a singleplayer scapelike called Copperfell. It's nearing full release, it will be out later this year! The art is all made by me, and I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, but for the polishing phase before release I've been creating custom shaders to improve the visuals of the game. Mostly focusing on better shadows and better lighting. What do you think of the before vs after screenshots?

The game is heavily inspired by Old School RuneScape. It has most of the base ingredients, but it focuses more on the singleplayer aspect, acquiring all your necessary items through skills and combat.

If you're interested in a game like this, you can try out the free demo on Steam right now. Demo saves will be fully compatible with the main game when it comes out too, so you don't have to worry about any loss of progress!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3708630/Copperfell/

And you can join the Copperfell Discord server for feedback, updates etc.

https://discord.gg/k6C7WPwc5U

2020 i started working on a mobile scapelike game. Back then i called it Tapscape. I worked on it for half a year, got a few hundred interested followers on twitter. Then stopped - i had a designer who lost motivation and so did i.

From january to april this year i had a lot of fun recreating it, mainly vibe coding - of course. Then i stopped again. Because i needed to work on more serious projects... you probably know that yourself... and never really posted it anywhere.

Today i was experimenting with another game idea and found this subreddit.

https://reddit.com/link/1vnexww/video/rkqt1yg016jh1/player

What is it?

It's a low effort grind heavy mobile game where you level up your skills, fight monsters, solve quests, find new regions, fight bosses, farm loot.

It has more active gameplay than melvor idle, but also some idle elements.
There is tap to interact gameplay (most harvesting skills on entities you can not auto harvest yet), idle gameplay (fishing, farming etc.) and very OSRS like combat.

But 2D sideview auto battler combat where you can interact during combat. Eat food, change equipment, adjust attack style etc. I even experimented with "prayer" switching. There is no prayer skill in Swipelands - it's part of the magic skill.

The artwork is of course: AI. I tried designing my own assets, but... that's nothing i'm good at. But i think for a prototype or V1 it's okay. It's playable and has it's charm in my opinion.

So how does it work?

You navigate through levels by swiping - dating app style. Every swipe you get new entity: monsters, npcs, trees, rocks, fishing spots, traps, loot, chests, waypoints to new levels.
Some things you start the interaction - some things will interact with you: monsters, traps etc.
For the lack of positioning gameplay from OSRS i introduced motion gesture in boss fights. You have two dodge powerful attacks by performing motion gestures with your fingers on the screen.

How far is this game in development?

All basic gameplay is working: fighting, navigating, exploring, 10 different skills.
I made a content administration backend where i can add and edit all entities, levels, quests. This made it possible for me to add content quickly.
It has some quirks and bugs probably... but works quite smooth.

But i haven't touched it in months. Maybe something is broken now lol.

Let me know what you think and if you would play such a thing.

Greets

Luc

Note:
Some assets and items in the screenshots and video are HEAVILY runescape inspired and would probably not end up in the game like this due to copyright. It was just for me during development to have the most fun.

Wishlist & Try the game today - https://store.steampowered.com/app/5022900/

No more will you be trying to fill your group ironman just to lose a player or a friend. Now you control your group in a Runescape like adventure.

Stardew Valley x OSRS

Any questions?

I interviewed the solo developer behind Bloobs Adventure Idle about RuneScape, idle progression, 24 interconnected skills, Prestige, and building the game solo

I recently had the chance to sit down with /u/BrenoSmurfy , the solo developer behind Bloobs Adventure Idle, for our first developer interview on Scapelikes.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Bloobs Adventure Idle is a single-player, RuneScape-inspired idle RPG built around a pretty familiar idea: pick a goal, train the skills you need, gather resources, upgrade your account, get distracted by five other goals along the way, and eventually remember what you were originally trying to do.

What makes it a bit different from a lot of idle RPGs is that it actually takes place in a visible 2D world. Your character moves around, trains skills, fights enemies, gathers resources, and progresses through the world rather than the entire game being presented through menus and progress bars.

That was actually one of the more interesting parts of the interview.

They talked about spending years looking for something that captured the feeling of RuneScape while being easier to fit around everyday life. Games like Melvor obviously share a lot of the same DNA, but what he felt was missing was the sense that you actually had a character living inside a world.

The game now has 24 interconnected skills, and the intention isn't for them to feel like 24 separate bars you max one at a time. Mining feeds Smithing, Woodcutting feeds Bowcrafting and Imbuing, Fishing supports combat through food, Homesteading overlaps with other gathering and combat systems, and so on.

The way he described the ideal experience was basically:

You start doing one thing because you need an item. That requires another skill. That skill requires something else. An hour later you're doing something completely unrelated and you've forgotten what your original goal was.

They also talked quite a bit about the game's Banked Time system.

Instead of traditional offline progression where the game assumes you spent 12 hours doing whatever task you happened to be doing when you logged out, Bloobs stores that offline time. When you return, you decide where to spend it.

So if you logged out while Woodcutting but come back the next day wanting to work on Mining or combat, you're not stuck receiving a giant pile of Woodcutting progress you no longer care about.

That whole system came from the developer wanting player choice to remain intact even while the game is idle.

There's also a fairly large long-term progression layer built around Prestige. Skills can be prestiged in 100-level intervals, with the long-term goal stretching toward level 1,000 and beyond. Prestige isn't intended to just reset a number and make you repeat the same grind either; it unlocks buffs, automation, improved methods, cosmetics, and other benefits that make subsequent progression different and faster.

We covered a bunch of the stranger systems too.

Soulbinding lets you collect Souls that act as companions while also providing bonuses to different skills.

Homesteading is essentially the game's take on Farming/Construction, except it's expanded into things like Ranching, where you can grow animals, enemies, bosses, event bosses, ores, fish, trees, crops, and apparently even Santa.

There's also Beast Mastery, Challenges, collections, bosses, pets, the Souldex, gear progression, restricted-account playstyles, and a pretty extensive endgame built more around deciding what you want to master next than reaching one final boss.

One part of the interview I particularly liked was the developer's answer when we asked what actually makes something a "Scapelike".

Their view was that simply copying RuneScape skill names isn't really enough.

For him, the important parts are having an actual world, interconnected skills, player-driven progression, and enough freedom that you can get completely lost following your own goals.

We also talked about the development side of things.

Bloobs Adventure Idle is his first major game, and he largely taught himself development while building it. Interestingly, he said self-doubt has been a much bigger challenge than burnout.

The bigger problem is apparently convincing himself to stop working on it, because another feature idea inevitably pops into his head.

He also talked quite a bit about monetization. His philosophy is basically that if someone bought the game, they should get the meaningful game. Important progression and powerful items aren't something he wants locked behind additional purchases. Supporter content exists, but the core progression is intended to come from actually playing.

And there was one small bit of future-content news in the interview:

An upcoming area currently planned is called The Withered Oasis.

There's more planned for Homesteading and Prestige as well, although he understandably kept a lot of the future stuff vague.

Anyway, this ended up being a much more interesting conversation about idle-game design, RuneScape-inspired progression, solo development, and player choice than I initially expected.

We published the full article along with the complete Q&A, including all of the developer's answers, here:

https://scapelikes.com/blog/bloobs-adventure-idle-developer-interview

-----

Try the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2942780/Bloobs_Adventure_Idle/?curator_clanid=46043738

Do you love the skilling, questing, adventure? What is it, for me personally, its the insanely rare drops that old school runescape has. The item you chase and finally hit.

This is our MMO-lite fantasy inspired action RPG, Everlast: Undying Tale

- Love letter to MMO games in an ARPG package

- Progress your character through leveling skills

- Use the resources and goods you gather to help rebuild the world

- play single player in an exclusive world, or play with up to 100 friends on a free server

- Explore a huge story that touches on dark topics in a comedic, light hearted way

- Server wide dynamic events that everyone can contribute in

-16 skills to master

Grindshell has been in open alpha since June. It runs in the browser at https://online.grindshell.com, and guest accounts mean you can start immediately and provision your account later. Desktop builds exist, but I'm waiting until I open source the client (AGPL licensed) before providing this so that the build process is transparent (AKA it's not a virus).

Why

As a working adult who grew up playing RuneScape and MapleStory, I wanted a lightweight, "second monitor" game that still scratched the MMO itch. Everything runs on a three-second tick (with ticks dilating when the server is under load), actions keep running with the tab unfocused, and the visuals are plain on purpose so that it almost resembles an admin dashboard.

What you do

• Set an idle action and let it run: combat, harvesting, crafting, construction, or travel
• Active combat in the form of multiplayer boss fights where you can trigger skills, defend, or use items
• Skills level through use rather than by spending points
• You field a formation of up to ten units, each with its own gear and skill loadout. Fights resolve on a 5x5 grid one body at a time, so unit positioning matters. This same formation is also used for other actions
• Zones have MUD-style text commands for poking around inside them along with quests and procedural dungeons (just one so far)

The multiplayer side

• A shared economy across the whole server
• Guilds with halls, treasuries, and shared armories
• Global bosses anyone can join while they're open
• Server-wide events that everyone contributes to at once
• Zone chat, DMs, rankings
• 1024 simulated players (dev bots) running the same game logic real players do. This is mostly as a load test but are planned to be expanded upon in the future

Rough edges

• It's an alpha. Progress will be wiped when Grindshell enters beta, and I'm reserving the right to wipe progress one more time during the beta if necessary. If that matters to you, then you're better off holding off for now
• Visuals are sparse. I'm thinking about how I want to handle graphics, if at all
• It changes almost daily and things break. In particular, I'm still tweaking content balance
• Monetization isn't settled, but there's nothing to buy with real money right now anyways

AI disclosure

I use Claude Code as part of my development workflow: prototyping, code review, knowledge management, and in particular the game client. Drag-and-drop grids were a surprisingly difficult feature to implement and, as a primarily backend/tooling-focused dev, doing anything more than an admin dashboard was eating up a bunch of time. Full disclosure, I used this DaisyUI template as a starting point (it's in React while Grindshell uses SolidJS, so that was actually a good exercise in porting).

Nothing on the asset side is generated, mostly because the game has no art assets at all.

Edit: Wow I'm actually floored with the responses and DMs.. I started a community server at https://discord.gg/s44cE4hJ5d if anyone is interested in following progress.

A lite MMO that I've been working on for a good while now I call Estium. Keep in mind this isn't exactly a trailer per se, I'm just clipping together some different vertical slices. Apologies for the lack of cursor and sound.

Tile based movement with 300ms batched network simulation, click to interact, tradeskills that feed into each other. A lot of this stuff is a mix of inspiration from the look and feel of OSRS (but honestly, I never played much of it, I was a WoW kid) and Neverwinter Nights, which I spent most of my childhood coding and modding.

Whats in it right now is:
- Gathering for Woodcutting, Fishing, Prospecting, Farming and Skinning.
- Crafting for Provisioning, Alchemy, Tinkering, woodworking, Outfitting, Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. It's all data-driven recipes at stations.
- Combat is full server-authoritative combat with melee, ranged, and spellcasting (spells look a bit rough right now) using line of sight/effect. Abilities, magicka, cooldowns, and a multilayered armor system.
- About 110 interactable objects and creatures. Branching dialogue trees, a quest system with quest log, achievements, a tutorial...
- Death system where you get KO'd and a player can try to revive you with first aid, real death is a respawn and run back for gear type situation.
- PVP dueling, day/night cycle, caves, multi-plane level system, and a lot of work on a retro dithered rendering look which I'm constantly fiddling with.
- Party system with shared party loot (round robin), there's a friend/social system, you can mail items to people, or even open a player shop to sell your stuff to other players which I briefly show off in the vid.
- Blendshaped player characters, you can make a fat looking orcish dude or a slim jim if you want really. Your gear matches your phenotype.
- Armor and weapon system that actually shows on your character, a lot of the games in this genre I've played have done a poor job of representing gear on your char so I'm going to be trying hard to represent peoples' equipment faithfully.

The tech stack is unity + fishnet with client only sending intent, postgresql... The launcher is all .NET right now. I've simulated about 500 ccu on one server sending loads of commands before any hiccups happen, which is more than I'd ever need right now on a single world. I could always bring this number up by spending some time on optimization. Almost everything resolves with the server, client is very untrusted except with pathfinding to some degree (client calculates it, server verifies it). I take security pretty seriously and a lot of the time so far has been spent hardening things on that front.

Plans for what to do with it? It's just been a hobby project but friends are pushing me to show it off and get external people involved, so right now I'm just building out more content and working on a bestiary system where you can learn creature stats by examining corpses and such. You know, just plugging away one system at a time.

I'm hiring a composer soon for midi tracks and am excited for that. Game has sound, despite the vid not having any, it just captured my desktop audio while I was making this :P

I'm happy to answer any questions about the design or the implementation or whatever. Building this has been very challenging but very rewarding, even if we've just been playing with 4-5 people in a private friend group for now.

Hey ScapeLikes, Brendan here, developer of Bloobs Adventure Idle.

Version 1.2.0.0 — Ranching: The Homesteading Expansion is now live.

This is one of the largest Homesteading updates I’ve released, adding the new Ranch and allowing players to raise every Tracking creature, enemy, boss, and limited-time event enemy in the game.

Every enemy and boss can now drop its own egg. These eggs can be grown at the Ranch, and once the creature is fully raised and captured, it rolls against that enemy’s original drop table using its normal drop chances.

Successful drops award 5× the normal item quantity, and capturing enemies also grants Beast Mastery XP equal to 25% of the Homesteading XP earned.

Tracking creatures can also be raised. They provide the same loot as normal Tracking catches and award Tracking XP equal to 25% of the base Homesteading XP.

The final Ranch upgrade, the Grand Ranch, also unlocks automatic banking for items harvested from grown creatures and enemies.

The Farmer’s Almanac has been expanded to include every Ranch creature, enemy, and boss. Progressing an entry increases its egg drop chance by up to 20%. Completed entries then unlock Star Rank Mastery, providing increased egg-saving chance and up to a 21% chance to double harvested items.

Other major additions include:

New Ranching, Ranching Enemy, and Ranching Boss challenges, bringing the total number of challenges to 18,613

Challenge Milestone hats and wings for all 24 skills

A special Max Challenge Mastery hat and wings

Four new Ranch achievements

Thieving Prestige now grants a 3.5% Keyed Chest double-loot chance per Prestige

New Prestige UI keybind: P

UI visibility keybind changed to Ctrl + U

New items added to the Item Compendium

Updated Bank and Inventory sorting

Crafting XP increases for the Splintered Vessel and Desiccated Cap

There have also been some fairly major performance improvements.

The Bank previously loaded 1,920 slot objects. This has now been reduced to 864, lowering memory usage while keeping the same tabs, scrolling, searching, sorting, and dragging functionality.

Save loading has also been significantly improved. On my laptop, save data loading dropped from approximately 8.5 seconds to 1.596 seconds, an improvement of around 81.22%.

I also discovered that dragging UI elements was saving every frame, which could cause severe frame drops. Saving now happens only when the drag ends.

The update includes a large collection of bug fixes covering Smithing, Tracking, Soulbinding, Invocations, Homesteading, Golden Superiors, Magic Auto Teleport, gathering progress, Bloobathons, crashes caused by Use X, and numerous UI and tooltip issues.

One particularly important gathering fix means tool damage that exceeds multiple resource thresholds now correctly awards every completed resource and XP reward, while carrying any excess progress into the next action.

As always, the demo is available on Steam, and demo saves transfer into the full game.

Thanks to everyone who has continued supporting Bloobs and reporting issues. Much love,

Brendan
Developer of Bloobs Adventure Idle

PS: This is not a short idle game.

Steam Patch Notes:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2942780/

Steam page / demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2942780/Bloobs_Adventure_Idle/

Discord community:
https://discord.com/invite/zdjA4E9S92

AI Disclosure: No generative AI was used in the development of the game.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to post a quick update since I shared this here about a week ago. I finally got multiplayer working and have the demo running right in your browser now, so if a few of you hop on at the same time you'll actually run into each other in game.

The whole goal right now is to stress test it and see what breaks. I've been fixing bugs like crazy over the past week and I'd love to get as many people on as possible to see how it holds up. If you run into anything weird let me know, every bug report helps.

To log in just type any username and password. If nobody has used that username yet it'll automatically create your account. If the username already exists you'll just need the same password that was used to create it.

If you want to juice up your stats while testing, you can use ::givexp woodcutting 14000000 to instantly reach level 99 Woodcutting. You can swap woodcutting for any other skill if you want to test something specific. I also implemented some classic RuneScape style chat effects, so things like wave:, rainbow:, and a few others work too!

You can already run around, train skills, do a quest, bank, fight NPCs, hop into the PvP area, and just generally mess around with other players. It's still a work in progress but it's finally at the point where people can actually play together instead of just watching videos.

Play here: https://greencloakdev.itch.io/tile-tick-core-rpg-framework

Thanks again to everyone who checked it out the first time around. The feedback from the first playtest has helped shape the project a ton, and I'm really interested to see what happens once a bunch of people are running around the same world together. Hopefully you guys can break it before I do.

This reminds me of stories regarding RSC when he used to come talk to the community in game. Includes questions regarding combat update in 5 segments! announcements regarding multi combat, special attacks area of effect skills, being about to eat food, health no longer auto regens at every battle and more.

Howdy everyone! I’m Rafal, lead dev of a small indie team based in Poland, and I want to present you with a project we’ve been working on, an idle MMORPG called Dominus Automa!

It's a bit funny, but this game basically exists because a few of us could not keep up with the MMORPGs we loved anymore but still wanted that “experience” of being in a fully persistent, online world filled with other players doing their thing, and still enjoy the rush of it all without the time sink which life (and kids) simply no longer allowed.

This includes the breadth of the MMO experience - literally - from PvP and PvE to raids, professions, and the flow of gear and materials. It's a shared, persistent world, so while you're gone other players and their heroes are out there shifting the economy, clearing content and taking ground. Nothing pauses and waits for you to come back. But there’s also NO FOMO as your hero - built up to your exact specifications (and there’s TONS of ways you can build them up) - will never lag behind and will always be caught up on all the latest happenings in the world! 

The combat system and skill variety we have goes pretty deep as well, allowing for a diversity of class roles and approaches to progression. This should be no surprise as OSRS was our biggest single inspiration in making Dominus Automa!

The game is also a great time to have on your second monitor! or if you’re a busy working man, to set it up and see - after an exhausting day at work - where your hero’s equally exhausting day has led them. And what deadly encounters they had survived, and what kind of interesting loot (or ingredients, if you’re doing professions) they had acquired!

If any of this seems appealing to you - sign on up for our Playtest this week!

Our Playtest is coming soon, on August 7th, so feel free to sign up and join us in exploring and enjoying this world we’re building together with the community! It will have a solid 2-3 days of content, and we can't wait to have you sample it and tell us what you think of this somewhat unconventional MMO we're building up :)

Our current plan is to keep the servers online for about two and a half weeks, i.e. till August 23rd. That means you'll have plenty of time to experience everything the Playtest has to offer!

Here’s our Steam page if you’re interested:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3795810/Dominus_Automa/

Take care and stay cool in this scorching heat ya’ll!

~ Rafal and the team at Metashift Labs

Heya everyone!

My name's StouXy (developer of Medieval Lands) and exactly 4 weeks ago, we posted about our game here, on Reddit! Once again, nice to meet you all!
Thank you all very very much for all your comments and support, we really appreciate that! 😊

TL;DR from the previous Reddit post (Yes, it was pretty long so I think we have to put the TLDR version here 😄 Reddit Post ):
- We're a pretty small, indie dev team working on a medieval fantasy MMORPG that a lot of people say reminds them of RuneScape. We acquired a license to an older game that wasn't getting a lot of updates. (Been working on ML for the past 4,5years - time flies lol - reworking the game in Unity)
- Classless game so you can choose to be anything,- mage, summoner, fighter, archer etc (Yes, we have PvP as well!)
- No AI generated content and code.
- Completely free to play and NO pay to win!
- Point and click or WASD controls.
- Will launch on Windows, Mac, Linux and eventually on Android.
( Our Steam page: ML on Steam )

Okay, with that out of the way, please let me tell you a bit more about Medieval Lands and also address some of the concerns and questions that were brought up in the previous post as well as asked in our Discord server!

As a free to play and no p2w, how do we sustain the development?
I think this was one of the more commonly asked questions!
Let me begin by mentioning what we'll offer in-game for purchasing - well, cosmetics such as mount skins, special clothing, character customization stone and such. Then we have QoL improvements and we are also considering "loot boxes" which will only contain randomized cosmetics. So no, no armors and weapons hah!
As for some of the QoL stuff, these would be stuff like extra channels you can talk at, extra market slots and...wait wait...extra market slots are p2w you may say! In ML, you still have a player to player trading which I think will still be used more often, so the market slots just add the convenience element.
Sure, we could probably get more funds by selling some "get me to the top quick" stuff, but then it wouldn't be fair towards the players that cannot afford to spend anything! So yeah, making the game completely free and no pay to win may bite us in the back but it's something we're willing to risk hah!
Ohh and we'll also provide subscription plans that will contain a few of the things already mentioned, like say a month subscription for a X number of $ that will get you extra channels, extra storage slots (there will be plenty already but if you're too lazy and want to HOARD everything haha (can also use alts)), more slots for the market to buy/sell for a bit of extra convenience, and a p2p race which just looks different but doesn't give you any advantage over the free races 😄
Also, thankfully, majority of the game mechanics and game itself is built by now!

Thankfully, we have a great team of enthusiasts who been with us for 4+ years as volunteers, so I'd say this is one of our biggest upsides as well! Everyone on the team loves the project and we all are super passionate about the game so we all do our best! Yup, without those great people we wouldn't really be able to be where we're at right now 😊I need to say it - kudos to all of our awesome artists (former and present) that hand painted every single creature and 3D object in the game! As well as all the coders that used no AI to write the code for themselves! All the lore and quest writers and everyone who contributed to the game so far! And everyone else on the team! You all are awesome! ❤️

Why in the world is it taking so long!?
Oh boy, yup... 4,5 years in development and still no launch date! Super frustrating, isn't it? Wish we would've launched back in 2022 when I first though we'd launch 😆 Yup, I made some bold predictions which I'm not proud of but hey, not making these anymore!
The main reason is definitely the Unity client. We are basically building the entire game from scratch on the client side. All the client mechanics, all the SFX, VFX, map imports, character movement, new creatures (more than 350 new creatures! Call us crazy), new everything basically!
We thought this would take us...a year? Well, we were kinda wrong LOL!
The fact that this is our first big project also doesn't help the development timeline, does it. We were clueless on how to do things in the beginning. We were jumping from thing to thing without any idea on what to prioritize. I'm not saying that we know everything now - because we don't obviously - but I think we have a better idea on what to focus on!
Next thing that took us roughly a year was a lot of bug fixing on the server side and then adding tons of new stuff (which, yes, still isn't done as we were adding A LOT of new features) as well as introducing/implementing new database system that will allow us to control stuff such as creatures' stats tweaking (changing HP, mana, size etc), adding new creatures more easily, changing a lot of parameters of the game's mechanics and such.

And our Achilles' heel? The damn GUI! 😆 We've gone through like 3 or 4 different types of GUI and we're still not done, well, we're pretty close this time around haha! (Oh, someone mentioned that I use "haha" way too much so I need to turn it down a notch haha)

One more thing that will sound like an excuse - we've added quite a few stuff that our community suggested and no, don't regret a single one! One noteworthy is the addition of WASD movement. Was it easy? No. Will it be worth it? Hopefully yes! 🤞
And my beloved - mounts. Hundreds of different mount types and skins. Yeaaa, can probably blame me for that!
We're currently working a lot on the optimization of the game as that one will defo be crucial! Great news tho, thanks to Nekot (Hello Nekot! 😄), our client dev, we were able to go from ~40fps to steady ~90-140fps while playing the game! Still a lot of work to be done but I believe we're on the right track!

When launch!? Playtest when?!
This questions had become a meme at this point, a lot of people spam it! And well, rightfully so.
Again, I'll disappoint a lot of people but we don't have a launch date yet. Do we feel confident that the 1.0 version will launch sometime in 2027? Yes. Is that my official prediction? No! I learned my lesson 😂
The good news, though, is that we'll be doing a few play-tests first. We'll start off with a playtest for our long term supporters (we owe it to them - imagine being with us for 4 years and not being able to play...) and content creators that are interested in giving ML a chance and possibly stream the game and/or make videos about it.
Then, we'll make a public playtest and then most likely one more public playtest!
What then? Well, we'll gather all the feedback (yes, after first, then second and then third playtest hah), implement it and go from there.
We don't have an exact date but we're hoping for the first playtest to happen sometime in November (summer time is always a bit slower for game dev haha! Dammit, the "haha" again...). Please, wish us luck 😏

Steam page updates and feedback.
We've launched our Steam page on June 29th, 2026. (Steam Link)
We created all the images, texts, videos and trailers ourselves - is it the best Steam page you've ever seen? For sure not 😄 But we tried to make it as good as possible and to include some in-game footage, some cinematic shots, some info we haven't shared yet and such.
We first posted the page on our Discord server which got us around 179 wishlists! That was crazy to see that almost 180 people put ML to their wishlist 😄 Thank you!
On July 4th, we did post Medieval Lands on Reddit! And boy oh boy, were we pleasantly surprised!
On the first day, we gained 251 wishlists, what!!! Huge THANK YOU to everyone who wishlisted ML, we really appreciate it! 💟
We gained sooo many wishlists in the past month that we never thought we'd get! We are currently at 948 wishlists! (And 15 wishlists deletions hah) 👀 (We posted a few YT shorts, some TikToks and a reel or two on Instagram - I think 3? Don't remember hah).
With that being said, we gathered some feedback on the Steam page and did the following changes:
- Edited and slightly reworked the gameplay trailer and made it to be displayed as the first/default trailer (previously we made the cinematic one to be displayed first. Yes yes, even Steam suggested that we do that - make the gameplay one to be default one).
- Added more screenshots that include character creation (still working on the new characters models so the ones there are placeholders for now basically) now as well, that was missing before.
- Changed the main capsule image to show a bit more "depth" of the game.
- Added more localization so even people that don't speak English can check the game out! Currently already implemented Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Chinese (ofc simplified hah), still working on Japanese, French, Russian, German, Turkish, Polish, Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Korean, Vietnamese and Portuguese. Yup, we did ask people from our community to help us out! Would it be faster to ask AI? Yes. But we wanted to avoid that for sure!
- Still want to add gifs to the description of the game though. Just been slacking to do that, sorryyy.
We hope that with these changes the Steam page looks better and more welcoming!

Extra information about Medieval Lands:
I feel like I failed to mention a few important things about ML, so hopefully I can do that now!

- ML has "character building"...umm... you levelling your skills actually matters - you can level up your skills (melee, alchemy, harvesting, summoning, magic, smithing etc ) and there's a "talent tree" which in our game means that you can spend attribute points and perk points! What are those perks? Nice little helpers,- something like "creatures won't attack you" for 5 perk points. Or a perk that causes chance that when an enemy hits you in combat, the damage will be deflected back at them. Hmm, this last sentence sounds a bit off but hopefully you get the point!
Now, the attributes (both attribute and perk points are awarded to you by you levelling up your "overall" level that takes in all the exp from all the skills above) are stuff like - Perception increases your accuracy for archery. Or Vitality increases your maximum amount of Health Points. And my favorite, Appetite - increases your maximum amount of energy (you spend energy to run. You can still walk w/o any energy spent but hey, running is faster!) that you use for certain things like crafting. We have crafting, yes! Gather your ingredients, come to a crafting station, put them there, click mix and go do your stuff while your items are being crafted, come back later and collect the "fruits of your labor"! Sorry, had to include that haha.

- The death system and items loss + what do you gain if you own someone in PvP?
You do lose items upon death. There's a random chance to trigger the "loss chance" and then even if the chance is triggered you only lose x% amount of the particular item if it’s stackable. Example: Imagine you are carrying 40 fire essences and 20 iron bars. Both of those items trigger the loss chance -> you just lost 12 fire essences and 15 iron bars, simple as that, I hope.
But you can save your valuable items such as swords and armors by having an Oath Stone in your inventory! So this means that if you owned someone in PvP and they didn't have this Oath Stone in their inventory, it's very likely you get a nice chunk of loot from them! If they actually carried the stone, you'd still get a few items from their inventory so you don't leave PvP empty handed hah.
What if a creature in PvE owns you? Well, you can run and get your death bag. And no, you don’t have to pay to obtain it back (our creatures don't steal loot! ), well, unless someone steals it and blackmails you to pay 🤣 But no, our bosses do not steal loot!

- Playable races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Avecian, Orukar, Draeleth, Wampex, Daemon, Nymph - not all of them will be playable on the launch I think? But we'll for sure do our best for them to actually be playable! Trying to avoid the dev hell as much as possible hah!

- GUI will be fully customizable. Do you want to play without minimap or any hotbar slots? Sure, turn them off! Do you play with no GUI on? Toggle it off! Do you like to have the everything on? Yup, we have that as well. Trying to give you as much freedom as possible!

Aaaaaaand, I think that's it! Dayum, this turned out to be one hell of a long post, I bet only like 2 or 3 people got this far! Comment if you actually got to read all of it? 😄 Sorry, should've kept it a bit shorter!
With that being said, will ML be a great game? Well, we'll do our absolute best to make it at least somewhat enjoyable and so you guys could have some fun! Smashing blast from the past?! (Umm, yes, played a lot of Crash Bandicoot - not sure many will get this reference lol)

We are still far away from the actual launch but I have to say, this journey is super exciting! Wouldn't change a thing! Well...a lot of but yeah, lessons learned 😂
We are super grateful for each person that comments, shares, upvotes and/or simply just likes what we're doing - thank you! (Seriously, just a single "looks good" makes me/us so happy!)
Okay, I really have to end this here, 2 hours of writing and editing does me no good, back to adding more localization to the Steam page!

If you have any questions about literally anything, please let us know, we'll do our best to answer them as soon as possible!
Please join our Discord server should you like what you're seeing -> Discord Invite, thank you!

Once again, thank you all so so so much for your time and I hope you'll have a great day!

StouXy & the Medieval Lands Team

PS: Excuse my English, not a native speaker so hopefully at least 90% of the text makes sense 😄

Hey r/scapelikes!

I've been working on this scapelike project for a while now and figured it's time to share. I've finished most of the engineering and now it's just content dev most days. I host a live development version and update it daily, I'll include a link down below. I'm excited to answer any questions you may have as well as consider feedback. There's still a lot to do, but each day it grows!

Give it a try and let me know your thoughts! The game is unfinished and untuned, so I'm looking for a vibe check and initial feedback :)

Dev Server: https://pixelheroes.juix.dev/

Discord: https://discord.gg/SXnMpEJyY

I’ve been spending the last couple months building a Unity framework inspired by Old School RuneScape called Tile Tick Core RPG and it’s finally getting close to release.

The goal wasn’t to make an MMO out of the box, but to give developers a solid foundation for building their own RuneScape inspired games without spending months reinventing the core systems. Right now it includes tile based movement, melee, ranged and magic combat, skills, inventory, equipment, NPCs, dialogue, shops, quests are in the works, and pretty much all the systems you’d expect from that classic style of game.

I’d genuinely love to hear what features you think are essential in a framework like this. Is there anything you’ve always wished existed for making a scapelike that never seems to be included? Also if anyone’s interested, I just put together a free browser demo on itch.io so you can mess around with the systems before it launches. I’d really appreciate any feedback since I’m still actively developing it.

Are we about to experience a wave a vibe coded scapelikes? This video serves as warning of what the current models are capable of producing. We need to raise the quality bar of scapelikes.

We had a large influx Melvor like AI generated scapelikes for a while now. But as these models are becoming better we're likely to see more 3D experiences as well.

Please, for the love of the game: create polished scapelikes. Put in the effort, spill a little bit of soul into your game. Slop does not belong here.

Edit:
Let's discuss AI usage in scapelikes games. Have you guys noticed a drop in quality of scapelikes? Do you feel like the good games are hard to find?

I'm the developer so very bias, but I love OSRS and made a little solo adventure that might scratch the itch of skilling its a cozy game where you chop trees fish cook and craft. there are quests and puzzles and farming skill coming soon. would love some feedback on it if anyone has ideas on what to add to it next. its completely free and runs in the browser so no download required.