It's not as exciting however, on a more personal level, testing in the office is much more convenient since we have testing labs, or whatever. However, since everyone's living at home, I'm dropping off phones everywhere, right and in the middle, trying to purchase iPads for those on brief notice to test that have been among the logistics issues.
When people ordered RuneScape on their mobile devices with OSRS Fire Cape and received a few of items in the game such as benefits, as well as attractive teleport variations - and with it's launch to mobile devices, will there be micro-transactions through the various apps or is it not really an issue?
Naturally, we're considering the business opportunities that mobile has and we're also trying to deliver the best information to the users in the most efficient format. We understand that mobile users have different habits - therefore, we're considering things like subscriptions for instance. RuneScape is always been a subscription-based game, and typically, we offer memberships in chunks of say two or four weeks.
With mobile, we realized that people would want to experience the benefits of mobile in smaller amounts, which is why we've launched one-day, three-day and seven-day subscriptions as alternatives. That's what caused us to create some changes from what we've done in the past in order to meet the needs of those kinds of users are more likely to be attracted to.
Many players pay for their account by grinding currency, which is free to play is that feasible?
It's a very valid option for the majority of players who are paying to join.
It's an excellent method and it is possible to use gold to buy bonds. You can utilize bonds to pay for memberships and other forms of currency. This is still used in exactly the same way for mobile devices, and we like the fact that lots of players utilize it to purchase a membership. It's an excellent method to get a feel for the game, and that is a great way to save money as well. Some of the stuff that we're introducing is added and we're not removing anything.
What's the longest time that the mobile port has been working on for?
How long is it? I'd guess it's been around five years, but maybe six. When we began this project idea, it was a massive concept and we were looking for ways to help we could get the game to mobile devices. It started by the challenge of figuring out how to make an UI on the display. This has turned out to be an epic because there have been many variations of it. If anyone has played through the beta, they'll notice the numerous modifications we've made over the many years. It's been a long road.
How did you integrate the complex menu system into a your mobile device?
I'm sure it would be great to have two action buttons that are displayed on the screen, with a mini-map and the ability to open your inventory in mid-combat, so you can have food, but on a tiny screen, has been the most significant for the team. It required a lot of iterations. I can remember our UX designer making a simple prototype that was displayed placed on a smartphone screen.
He would simply announce numbers that were linked to buttons on the mock-up and observe how fast you could reach each item with OSRS Boosting Service by using your thumb. It would definitely increase in difficulty, so that you will feel like you're in Dance Dance Revolution by the close of the game, and achieve the most effective way to map buttons onto the display.