“It’s a 20 year old game, so a lot of content exists. A lot of content that isn’t best suited to be on mobile screen, because at the end of the day, it was made 15 to 20 years ago, when playing games like this on a mobile was, well a ‘no one could ever have dared to imagine it’ type thing” explains Hall. “What we focused on with first moving RuneScape over to mobile was a lot of the intractability of the game. From that point onwards, it’s kind of just been iterative changes and tweaks to content as we go, addressing the most important areas first, and then spreading out, because you can’t port 20 years in one go.” Casey keenly points out this extra work also helps out development on the PC version, saying “Some of the changes made in the optimisations are kind of global. So things like camera positioning and controls and top level interface, those you can apply to whatever content you’re doing in the game. There are some corners of the game which are so old. The beauty is a lot of that content is stuff that the players, either our active players, or
If there’s no mushroom forest, did you even play an RPG?
even returning players, have probably been through anyway. So we can kind of start from the more current stuff and the new bosses that we’re releasing and then work our way back from there.” Hall adds, “It’s actually a really great opportunity to go back and improve a lot of our quite old code now, especially to do with our top level interface and things that are many years old. We can just go back and reduce some of that technical debt, which has been, from my point of view, really, really fun. But, yeah, probably not many people would think that.” Perhaps the first problem to solve from a design perspective was the transition from a mouse with a right- click button to tapping a touch screen. Casey elaborates: “We solved that fairly quickly, and the solution was a click and hold. I think because of the way RuneScape is designed, it’s predominantly a point-and-click which is quite an old style of interface, but point-and-click actually lends itself quite well to a mobile environment because it’s equivalent to tapping. So you know, pointing and clicking on where to go, you know, on the screen, seems quite intuitive.” Hall explains that finding the correct timings for these new (or old) actions was still of the utmost importance, to avoid the game feeling laggy to players, saying “Yeah, it’s very much like the finesse of it as well, like things with tap and hold. If you make the delay on that a split second too long, it just doesn’t feel right. So quite a lot of time went into
68 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
prototyping, trying out different things, you know, kind of figuring out what was actually gonna feel the best.” The user interface for RuneScape Mobile ultimately ended up being very usable in the game that was released, but actually presented more of a development challenge to the team for a long time. “We went through I don’t know, three or four different art styles just for like the UI, which took a lot of time. Like, at the end of the day, it took a lot of time to change. It would have been really nice to have a solid UI style that we would have stuck to throughout all of development.” says Hall, before Casey adds “One of the things we learned was don’t design top level interface buttons that are a nice sort of yellowy gold colour, when half of the game is set above a desert. We realised that we had to redesign everything so it actually stood out from the sand.”
“If you’re designing new content, you need to think about how to get the most important information to the player in the best way when they only have a small screen”
Emma Hall, lead developer
Jagex has also considered console ports for RuneScape, but found that despite them being more than powerful enough to run the game, the primary input methods there weren’t really a great fit. “We’ve looked at other platforms. Consoles in general are a challenge mainly because of that issue with the controls. I know the Switch has a touchscreen, but, really, you need something that’s going to work natively with Joy-Cons and gamepad controls. It’s always a challenge for RuneScape, whether it’s mobile, console, whatever, to use that kind of method with a game that was designed for point and click. So I’d say, we don’t have any current plans to go into that space
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