A few months back, we gave an update on SimpleMMO, outlining the game’s current state and our commitment to resolving existing issues before introducing new mechanics. Our plan remains unchanged, but we’ve slightly revised the timeline. It is taking longer than we expected to get back on track.

When we initially published the post (available here), our timeline was based on the expectation that our new game IdleMMO would launch in summer. This release would enable us to redirect more resources to SimpleMMO at the start of autumn (or fall, for our American audience).

However, the situation evolved unexpectedly. Due to a significant surge in interest for IdleMMO, we decided to postpone its release to the end of the year. This delay allows us additional time to further polish the game. This decision was carefully considered and you can read about our rationale here. As a result, we haven’t yet been able to fully move over development resources back to SimpleMMO. However, this doesn’t mean we haven’t been developing both games concurrently – we definitely have. Our recent updates have mostly been behind-the-scenes, resulting in no notable changes in the update log. However, as IdleMMO’s release nears, with a target of mid-December, we are increasingly focusing on ensuring a smooth launch.

So, let’s just clarify one thing by being extremely clear: SimpleMMO’s development will slowly return back to normal once all IdleMMO‘s apps have been published. In fact, recently, I’ve been itching to move back over to SimpleMMO for an extremely welcome change of pace. However, right now, this isn’t possible due to IdleMMO’s imminent release.

Why is there no update log of everything that happens behind-the-scenes?

I’ve noticed this question raised multiple times before, and simply put, there’s no need for such detailed technical updates. They would likely create more confusion than clarity. For instance, if we mentioned migrating our caching driver from file-based storage to a Redis key-value database, or applying middleware to update the client’s connecting IP to the one that connects to Cloudflare’s edge, it would prompt questions like “What does this mean? What is Redis?” Providing such intricate technical details serves no practical purpose and would only consume valuable time.

Future Expectations for SimpleMMO

I touched on this in my last post, but to recap, many upcoming updates will significantly enhance existing systems. Additionally, the mobile UI will undergo a substantial overhaul to incorporate a more modern design pattern—we already have a working prototype of this.

Until then, you have the winter holidays event to look forward to which will start on Friday December 15th.

If you haven’t already pre-registered for our upcoming game IdleMMO, you can pre-register here. You can also join our Discord for a chance to participate in our closed beta testing.

Feel free to let us know any questions you have in the comment box below.

We are thrilled to announce the exciting rebrand of SimpleMMO!

It wasn’t that long ago since we recently moved away from the sword logo to the dragon logo. In fact, we went into detail on the reasoning behind the rebrand and ultimately it boiled down to it being the most effective in pulling in new players.

As time went by, we slowly started to lose our love for the dragon logo due to two big reasons:

• The colour scheme presented significant challenges in our work process. The combination of blue, purple, orange, and red, along with small black elements, proved to be quite problematic when attempting to establish a cohesive and unified brand for the game. Despite the promotional images using a darker background, it was originally designed with the intention of placement on a white background. We’ve recently made a company-wide decision to shift our focus towards creating products solely using a dark colour scheme and, in our opinion, the logo doesn’t blend as effectively against darker backgrounds.
• The dragon and the text lack unity, existing as two completely separate elements, with the dragon positioned on top and the text beneath. While this design approach might suit other businesses or software, we realised it wasn’t quite fitting for a game. Our aim was to create a logo that exudes a more unified and game-like appeal.

During our pursuit of designing a new logo, our initial step involved creating a fresh app icon, which would serve as the foundation for the subsequent logo design.

The process for deciding on our new icon lasted approximately 6 months utilising the same tools provided by Google as we done during our previous rebranding. The tools allowed us to see if a logo was effective at bringing in new downloads to the game. As the app icon has a huge prominence in a store listing, being the first element users encounter on the Google Play page, it stands as one of the most critical factors in driving new downloads.

We went through various different types of icons testing the effectiveness of them against our dragon icon. During this period, we leveraged both traditional icons and icons created by artificial intelligence (AI) to explore its potential in creating an icon that could be even more effective than our dragon design.

Here are just some of the icons we tested throughout the time period:

Despite these icons, a critical problem remained unresolved: they failed to address the issues we had with the dragon icon, leaving us apprehensive about the possibility of yet another rebrand in the future, repeating the same cycle of uncertainty.

Throughout this period, we also dedicated our efforts to developing our second game, IdleMMO, and we are delighted that its logo addressed all the concerns we had with SimpleMMO’s dragon logo. The newly purchased logo boasts a cohesive design and an established colour scheme, perfectly aligning with our vision for the game.

So, naturally, we decided to use the same artist for SimpleMMO.

The results were overwhelmingly positive, as it was determined with 90% confidence that the new logo could potentially yield a remarkable 25% to 40% increase in engagement.

And it was definitely evident…

It is perfect and, as a result, we decided to completely change our brand to this new design.

The rebrand will be gradually introduced over the next few weeks, and we are absolutely thrilled with the response we’ve received so far. We firmly believe that this new logo perfectly aligns with the direction SimpleMMO is heading towards.