Sacred Tome arranged a Q&A with Levio, Malevays programmer and Alison, the community manager.
I've made a resumé for myself my partner and I think it may be useful for others too. It will not cover all that was said during the interview though. It was an hour and fortyfive minutes long. Time crammed with things you may want to know. So if you have time, listen to it. Remember this is my interpretation of what was said and what is important, always better to hear it first hand.
Link to the recording made by Donna Heartsdale: http://www.sacredtome.info/?p=10
The interviewer is Antonia Cascarino, who does an excellent job asking and forwarding questions from the audience.
A short summary about Malevay in the beginning: Catherine, Levio and Chimeric created Malevay together. Catherine in charge of marketing, Chimeric of animations and graphics and Levio for programming and scripts.
**About the upcoming expansion:
The Nocturnals, the first expansion, has been planned from the beginning. It will introduce some new species, coats, traits etc. We will be able to keep breeding the Diurnals as well as breed the Nocturnals and crossbreed between the two. They will all be compatible.
There will only be basic coats coming from the chest we buy for the expansion. The chests will cost the same as the starter packs do now, they will eat the same food and be able to use the same stumps.
About the two Oracles: Just like Vashara has been protecting the meeroos, so has Orlex. While she sent them to different parts of the world, he led them underground to protect them. He is now coming up and we will be able to choose to join him or stay with Vashara. It's not a good and evil side, they just have different ideas on what's the best protection for the future of the meeroos. But Levio adds that there may be a darker side to the nocturnal meeoos who has been dwelling under ground all this time.
We will choose what faction to belong to but it will be roleplay more than having any impact on breeding - at least for now.
We will still all use the same hud but there will be an updated version.
According to Levio the expansion will be introduced piece by piece as they are ready. We will not have to wait forever and then get it all at once. He uses the word soon for when the first parts will come, but soon is of course a very relative word. To us impatiently waiting - tomorrow?
**The update:
There will also be an update to the meeroos we have now. New things like coats and traits will be added to and come from existing meeroos. We will not have to buy any new boxes to get them.
Allision pointed out that the new coats may not be coming from the higher species or coats but as well from the lower ones.
They have not yet decided all about how to retire coats. But when they are retired we will no longer be able to breed them from our existing roos. If we have nests with that coat we can coax it and it will have it's coat but not pass it on to the children. Much like the Dryads works now.
If you're only gonna listen to bits of this interview I suggest the bit between 00:12:30 and 00:12:33. I hate spreading rumours that turn out to be wrong. You better listen for yourself and see what you make of it.
Antonia asked if they had considered offering a special coat if you have discovered them all, as a reward. Levio answered that they plan to keep adding new coats so there will always be more to discover.
**Other things:
There will be no petter that you pay once and then have it pet as much as you like. They are still trying to work out a way to restore the value of regard in a way that doesn't upset everybody. No matter what they do all players will not be happy.
Levio repeats that regard matters, but the genetics is still "the king". If you try to make a Kimodo, no matter how much regard you have if the parents don't have the genetics you won't get a Kimodo.
No magic potion to make the meeroos give better nests or surgical tools so we can change the gender will be introduced.
The Bengal will come from our existing roos one day, and they are at least thinking about Captain Blackcoat since he has such a fan club.
There will not be a feature on the hud showing the rarity of a roo. We need to discover the rarity levels on our own.
There will be no stumps for more than eight meeroos. The text has to go within the 256 characters limit of the prims textfield.
If there is more than 12 homes within 20 meters it can cause problems with getting them to attach to the right stump. Levio knows what the problem is and how to fix it so when we get updated scripts that should be fixed.
Levio is not negative to the idea of emergency food that could be fed to any meeroo if it turns out to be possible to implement in the scripts.
There are no plans for changes to the sizes of meeroos.
There will be water meeroos at some point. They won't need any special habitat with water.
Mee-pets resets to zero regard when they are rebuilt because they aren't supposed to have any regard at all.
Just a final thanks to Sacred Tome for arranging and sharing this with us, to Donna Heartsdale for publishing the recording and to all participants and Antonia Cascarino for the interviewing . And to Malevay for those amazing meeroos :o)
