Wizards, warriors and one monster of a mobile game

Gamevil has 500+ people working in 14 offices around the world. Predicting that the surge of popularity in MMORPG games in Asia will be followed in the West, they set a team of over 80 to work on developing Royal Blood, an ambitious MMORPG game for mobile.

Among other things, the game will feature a dynamic open world where you can join in live online quests with hundreds of other players and take part in huge Realm vs. Realm battles.

“It’s a full-scale MMO in mobile,” says David Mohr, general manager at Gamevil Europe. “There’s not a lot of games like that in mobile.”

The Unity Editor’s extensibility enabled Gamevil to add custom tools for creating events. The event tool allowed multiple users to work on scenes simultaneously. They could set event logic and location and create animations for the cut scenes.

Producing such a complex MMO mobile project with so many team members required a platform that Gamevil could adapt to their pipeline and processes across the entire organization.

“The C#-based modality of Unity allows many people to work on multiple objects simultaneously and minimizes the chances of unnecessary duplications,” says Byong Woon Jeon, Team Leader for the game’s battle designs. “With Royal Blood, we’ve had 80 people working simultaneously on different areas of the game, and as a result, we are getting things done much faster.”

Another way Gamevil extended the Unity Editor was with their own customized node-based creature creator, which they used together with Unity’s mecanim and override. This combination of tools enabled their artists to create high-quality visuals, which were optimized for mobile, without the help of programmers.

“Our artists had the creative freedom they needed to create. Simply by modifying the colors and textures of a basic set of characters, they were able to create a whole pantheon of interesting and compelling wizards, archers, warriors and bards,” says Byong Woon.

At the same time though, because it’s an MMO, the server had to control the whole system continuously, making it important to keep it as light as possible with a limited amount of memory.

Flexibility and extensibility were two reasons Gamevil chose Unity to meet their AAA ambitions in the mobile world. A third reason is Unity’s ease of use, which makes it easier to find the top-class talent out there, and if they’re not familiar with Unity already, to quickly get them up to speed.

“Unity is more developer-friendly than other game engines we’ve used in the past,” says Byong Woon. “Everything is integrated; there’s no need to use other software. So for example, that makes it two or three times faster to find and fix bugs directly in the editor. And the hierarchy really simplifies organization. Even a first-time user can understand and change the hierarchy in the system.”