Ward added, "Over the last couple of years, Runescape's had its highest point and has continued to grow upwards - not flatten, not go down, but it's continuing to climb. "We're seeing similar patterns, to go from what we've done with the pre-registration and with the early access, so we're pretty confident," Casey explained. Using website Misplaced Items, which tracks concurrent players on both Runescape and Old-School Runescape, you can see a giant leap when OSRS Mobile launched (note: at time of writing, Misplaced Items is down, likely due to the huge influx in players for Runescape Mobile's launch). Speaking on the process of adapting Runescape to mobile, both Ward and Casey regularly referred to learnings taken from OSRS, both when it comes to adapting the browser experience "we look at the key areas that we believe we can affect the most" and the interplay between browser and mobile play "a lot of the R&D was done as part of the Old-School project."īut the shadow of OSRS isn't just in the 'learnings' department, but the 'aspirations' one. There is some overlap into both games from that point of view, but we have more of an informal transfer of information." Ward told us there's no cross-over "in development teams, but where the commonality actually exists is that we have a team that we call 'Runescape Tech' are the guardians of the NXT engine. It's natural to assume that Runescape Mobile would build on lots of the learnings of Old-School Runescape Mobile, first launched four years prior (though it sees regular updates, just like the browser version). But according to Ward, the team growth offset that: "it actually helped us grow and scale our teams in a very positive way." No school like the Old-School With all that effort in developing a mobile game, you'd imagine that Jagex would have to slow down in other areas - particular in content regularity. "And even getting all of the publishing assets: icons, the trailers - these are all the things that our partners look at our ability, and our consistency, on delivering." We've had to prove a lot to both Apple and Google along the way - one that we can respond to feedback really well, and that we can commit or deliver to our commitments. "It's a lot to balance, but what we're finding with both partners is we're getting really good support - they've been incredibly helpful guiding us through the process. For the application process, "the Old-School launch taught us quite a bit there," Casey explains, but the process was still a difficult one, "as a predominantly desktop developer it was a learning experience for us, to make sure the game is fully compliant with all the developer guidelines from both Apple and Google."
#ANDROID RUNESCAPE MULTITASK ANDROID#
While some mobile games launch exclusive to iOS or Android, and then get launched on the other afterwards, Runescape Mobile launched on both at once (though Android had wider beta availability). Over four years later Jagex launched a few closed betas on Android, and one very limited one on iOS, in order to stress-test the servers and optimize mobile performance. "They're thinking about elements like how does somebody interact a little bit differently, what is the responsiveness and how do we cater to some of these experiences." Ward explained, "all of our content developers - they all now have mobile devices, so when they're thinking about the designs of their content, they're not just thinking about it from a point-and-click perspective. Jagex's strategy was a mix of new hires, bringing on board veterans from developers like King, and also helping the team adapt to the alternative play style of mobile. Players got to test it, and Ward explained how useful this was: "we looked at pain points, we looked at stability, and getting the one-to-one representation of our game engine running on the devices but our first objective was that we want Runescape's deep experience to exist on mobile." Casey said, "The program TeamViewer, which you can put on your iPad or your phone, lets you show your desktop - so we actually found players were using this on things like tablets to play the game."ĭevelopment on the mobile port started around 2016, and a year later the team had a prototype ready that players started testing, showing it off publicly for the first time at the annual Runescape convention Runefest towards the end of the year.
Back when Runescape Mobile was just a twinkle in Jagex's eye, clever gamers were apparently already playing the game on tablets.
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