checking it and restarting productions. The key to a successful session was always to prepare for the next one. If you forgot to do that, you would be playing sub-optimal and your in-game economy would suffer. You simply had to collect everything you produced and restart all productions in exactly the same way. There wasn’t much decision-making involved. Also, the UI was optimized for big screens and mouse control. There were mouse-over tooltips for everything, and the icons, interfaces and fonts were tiny. So when the mobile versions of FoE came out in 2014 (iOS) and 2015 (Android), respectively, we had to redesign much of the user experience while maintaining the same underlying mechanics. This led to a lot of conflict. For example, we had to add a ton of tap-able “?” buttons just to show the same content on mobile as on browser, since there is no such concept as “mouse-over” when controlling the app with your finger. The shift to mobile led to the desire to also change


the underlying mechanics. Something we couldn’t do, because we had to keep the mobile and browser versions compatible. One of the biggest challenges was the so- called “sessioning”. Mobile players were playing the game quite differently to browser players - they wanted more and longer sessions. This is why we ultimately designed RoC – where we


could change not only the UX, but also the mechanics under the hood. We wanted to ensure that you had more


things to do during a session, more flexible timers and a production queue. We also wanted to move away from the “prepare for the next session” aspect of the game and reduce the “collect everything and restart” feeling. Instead, we introduced a new resource that would reduce the number of taps a player had to do: Workers. These limit how many productions you can start, so you have to start thinking more strategically and making decisions based on need. You can’t let your workers produce everything at the same time because there aren’t enough of them. If you need food right now, for example, you send them to the farms. If you need soldiers, you send them to the barracks. Need Goods? Off to the workshops! And so on. Sessions were longer, but there was always a clear cut-off point at which you had to run out of things to do and had to wait for your next session. While we were maintaining RoC as a live game, we


noticed a big shift in the mobile market: The sessions of competitor games were getting longer and longer. Some of them could be played without a break for hours. Also, many games relied more on higher variance in the game state, meaning that two players with the same play time could have vastly different game pieces and states. In RoC, however, there was very little variance. The game was quite linear in terms of player progression. We also noticed that other games relied heavily on characters as the main game pieces instead of buildings. I suppose


December/January 2026 MCV/DEVELOP | 33


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