Originele tekst
It has almost been a month to the day that we announced Old School was coming to mobile. Naturally you had a lot of questions surrounding the announcement of what is arguably the biggest thing to ever happen to Old School RuneScape. There has been a constant clamour to know more about just how it's going to work, and understandably so, porting an expansive MMORPG to a mobile device is an incredibly ambitious project.
Touch Experience
Controls
We want to make OS Mobile feel as much like you'd naturally expect from a mobile app as possible; sliding in a direction to rotate the camera, pinching to zoom and quick touch gestures to interact with entities or open a menu.
Ultimately, we're aiming to have multiple options available for players to allow for customisation based on how you like to play the game; and when we move into Beta we'll have these prototypes available for players to try out and provide feedback on.
Keyboard
Main Game Screen Interface
The reasons for this are straightforward; native mobile keyboards can only appear from the bottom of the screen, meaning it would hide your chat window when visible; not ideal when it is the most likely place you're going to type. We also considered how you would hold your mobile when playing Old School and how to maximize the amount of game world you can view, which led us to separate the side-panel. Having them split with the option to hide means they're both in optimal positions to touch with your left or your right hand and meant that when collapsed you can see much more of the game. However, designs are not set in stone and the end result will very much depend on your feedback.
Once we're in beta we'll also be prototyping some additional features that should enhance the touch experience and we're looking at various designs to ensure the functionality of features like shift-click to quickly drop items continues to be to possible on Mobile.
Here's a screenshot from a very early build of the mobile client. Note that the chatbox is expanded, as is the skills tab.
Interface Scaling
Game Feedback
We're still working on designs for these and will reveal more as we get closer to a beta release.
Game Updates
Our weekly game updates will continue with Mobile and we have the process in place to have app updates readily available when the update is deployed, meaning you won't be disadvantaged or lose out by playing on mobile.
We don't do enough cheesy squad photos of the team. Here's one of us ignoring one another whilst scaping.
Compatibility & Performance
We'll be doing our best to ensure we have as much compatibility as we can. As with desktop, there will be devices that just don't play nicely or don't work at all, but we will be focusing on making sure the most commonly used devices are top of our list.
We're also working to improve performance in the mobile app to target a broader range of devices, and these improvements will ultimately benefit the desktop client too.
Beta & Beyond
Before we can start rolling-out a large-scale Beta, outside of getting the game into a good place we must update a lot of our supporting systems. These include systems like bot detection, player support portals and bug report queues and they all need to not only recognise that you're on a mobile, but provide useful information like your device specifications.
Beyond that we're working with the App Store providers to get the games approved, listed and available for beta; we're almost there with Google Play and are in the early stages with the Apple App Store.
The Mobile Beta will be performed in the live game, meaning that if you're invited, you can use your live account and make progress as usual in the live worlds with other players; so, it's very important we get it right before opening it up.
If all goes as planned we're looking to start rolling-out initial beta invites sometime after RuneFest this year; and once the beta begins we'll continue to iterate upon it. Adding features, fixing issues and addressing feedback, all while adding more players with each iteration.
Beyond the beta there's a lot more we can and want to do and we're sure there's a plethora of new features players will request for the mobile experience specifically... so your feedback has never been more important and we'll be discussing these in future developer blogs!
Mods Archie, Ash, Delta, Ed, Ghost, Jed, John C, Kieren, Mat K, Maz, Roq, Ry, Stone, Sween, TomH, Weath, West & Wolf
The Old School Team