Hey folks! It's been a minute since I've done a post like this, so if you don't know my name, I'm Melmsie. I'm the owner and creator of Dank Memer, and a lifelong gamer like many of you reading this.

Many people ask me what's planned for the game, my goals, and what I wish to change. As a game developer and business owner, I believe transparency around these things is essential, so let's chat about it.

First and foremost, let's talk about my goals as the person in charge of the direction of this game.

My first goal for Dank Memer, and the most important, is creating a game for people of all walks of life to enjoy. I want people who play casually once a week to have the same fun as someone playing for 10 hours daily (although please take breaks)! Sometimes this is hard to balance in a game that is inherently about "spend time progressing, so that you can unlock and achieve more", and we have some work to continue doing towards this. We can't devalue one set of players in favor of another.

My second goal for Dank Memer is longevity. We've already achieved this, and we're still going. A game having hundreds of thousands of monthly players 8 years after launch is NOT common in the indie space, and I'm proud of what we've accomplished. On top of wanting to create a legacy as a developer, I also would like continued stability for my family and the families of those who work with me on the game. We continue to work towards finding the right balance between making money for the stability we seek and not hurting those players without economic stability who can't afford to pay for our game.

These are the most significant overarching goals I have for this game, and we need to continue working towards improving. This leads to the next topic perfectly.

When wishing for change on these things, it's not just an idle thought. I'm constantly thinking about improving things. I hope that has been shown in my work over the years, even if we disagree on our process or results.'

One thing I wish I could change would be the approach to this game's initial design, which causes many of our balance problems today. When I started, I wasn't a developer, a game developer, or a business owner. I've made a lot of mistakes, and 100% of what I've learned in the last 8 years has been entirely taught through "fucking around and finding out".

The game concept I've fostered has been seen and enjoyed by tens of millions of you. Ultimately, the result is often the same due to my choice of making this game a global economy game.

While unique, it's fostered a lot of issues with cheaters, imbalances, and a struggle to monetize in a way that's stable for us while not being TOO "pay-to-win". I'm not sure if I'd make another global economy game, at least not intertwined like this one. With that said, there are zero plans to ever take away the global economy aspect, as that is what many of you signed up for, purposely.

I also wish we had made a different decision about slash commands. While we've brought back most of the pls functionality, and while Discord was "enforcing" the switch, we would have likely been fine ignoring their enforcement and continuing to use pls.

Now, slash commands are FAR superior in functionality and integration into the Discord client. Still, it took a while to get there, and we lost a lot of good players over this awful decision on Discord's end, and with our choice to follow them with this. Those players are now, for the most part, unreachable, and we're unable to bring them back without great difficulty.

It was the perfect storm with lockdowns ending, and this change people hated, causing us to permanently lose a large portion of our userbase, and that sucked to watch. With all this in mind, we don't sit around whining about mistakes. We get to work and learn and improve to better ourselves.

While we've created many new great gameplay features, the grind never stops for us. The caveat is that we must better bridge the gap between gameplay system depth and how complex we make things to learn, while still putting out new things for people to enjoy.

So for top-level big idea plans, we're working on new content, quality of life improvements, and a big focus on trying to win back old users while keeping new things simple enough for new users to not be confused joining in the middle of. It'll take some work, but we'll get there!

We also hear that many players think we "only do fishing updates now." While that's not the case, it tells me, as a developer, that you want even more content outside of fishing than we've already been doing. We're getting right on that with a big new adventure coming soon, among other things listed in our plans in the link below.

For specific plans, we keep a rough roadmap that was updated this morning and is often updated monthly. You can access that roadmap here. Be sure to read inside the cards for more specifics in some cases!

Thank you for being on this ride with us as the summer starts to come to an end and our busy season begins this fall. We love making this game, and we hope you continue to enjoy playing this game we've built alongside you as we keep working.