WildFlame Studio, the team behind the upcoming action MMORPG, Project MELO, has shared some very early development screenshots of their upcoming title. I had a chance to sit down with the Creative Director behind the upcoming MMORPG, whose experience in the gaming industry is nothing to laugh at, and had a small interview to talk about the future of Project MELO – including the renowned “Will it come to Consoles” question that seems to be the signature question from Tennek127 and myself.
The game has stated that it will be Free-To-Play with “No Pay-To-Win”, a promise we’ve heard time and time again in the MMORPG genre. Hopefully this is one promise, from a promising studio, that will stay true to its word.
As stated previously, I had a chance to sit down with Poinball, the Creative Director of WildFlame Studio, the team behind the upcoming Project MELO, to discuss the future of the game.
It’s nice to meet you, would you like me to call you Poinball from here on out?
Nice to meet you too! yeah, until I quit my day job, I prefer to stay under the nickname of Poinball :).
What can you tell us about yourself and your past experience in the gaming industry?
I always had a lot of interest for the gaming industry. For me it was important to know who was making the games that I loved. Since I was 12 years old, I’ve been captivated by the technology and the Internet. I’m also very curious and it’s important to me to know how the things are made. So I started to play around with some Level editor like the one for the game Runes and CounterStrike. I also made some basic Plugins in Minecraft. But I really started my journey in the gaming industry 7 years ago when one of my childhood friends was about to finish his class in 3D modeling for Videogame at the Ubisoft school in Montreal. It made me realize that it was possible to me to work as a game developer. So, I took the same class and It changed my life. It was clear that I wanted to make games for the rest of my life. A little bit after the class, I got a Modeler job at Ubisoft. I was working there during the day and working on personal project during the night to learn more. I rapidly became a Level artist and after a couple of years later, a Technical Artist.
That’s awesome, can you tell us a bit about your upcoming MMORPG, currently dubbed Project MELO:
Absolutely! We started the project 4 month ago, so we are still in pre-conception. We are starting to have a better idea of what the game will be. You know, when you start to make a game, we never really know that will be the final product. We have to try a bunch of things and sometimes fail to finally find the best way that a mechanic needs to be. Having an idea is one thing, but executing it properly is another. So, for Project MELO, the idea was to bring the best part of the most popular Action RPG like Diablo2 and PathOfExile for example, and make them fit in a 3rd person MMO. So, if you look at the current state of the game, you can see that we have an Inventory system similar to those title. We are also making a Loot System with a lot of granularity to have a maximum of item variations. We really want the game to feel like an Action RPG with a lot of people connected in the same world. The game will also have a Guild system, a Pet system, Dungeons and more.
Are there monetization plans right now or is it too early to say?
We want the game to be free to play without being pay to win. We have couple of idea on how to make it interesting to players, but we prefer on not giving too much information about that since like you said, its a little to early to know all the details
It’s clear that the name is just a project name right now, but where did MELO come from?
That’s a good question that I can’t really answer. What I can say is that MELO will have something to do with the final name of the game
You’ve mentioned in your Official Discord that the game is looking into consoles, what platforms are you considering?
Before answering that question, I have to say that its not easy for an Indie studio to release on Console. We need Development Kit from the Company (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) and they are very Expansive. After that, we need to port the controls and Fix all the Bugs related to them. Console have specific architecture and most of the time, we find major bug that take a lot of time to fix only to be compatible with that specific console. If the game will be popular enough and we have the founds and the talents to make it happen, we may consider to port the game on console. But it won’t be in the first years after the release that’s for sure.
What would you like to say to people looking at your game currently that might be interested in it?
Our team is starting to grow with very talented people. We are really exited to make that game and we can’t wait to share more information in the future. You can look at our Youtube Channel to follow our progress or join the Discord to Chat with us ! Thanks a lot for this interview!
You can check out more information on Project MELO below:
