C A rich world in the palm of your hand
Gamevil has more than 500 people working in 14 offices around the world. They assumed that the increase in popularity of MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) games in Asia would be replicated in the West. Then, they put together a team of more than 80 people to work on the development of Royal Blood , an ambitious MMORPG mobile game.
Among other things, the game will show a dynamic open world in which you can join live missions online with hundreds of other players participating in huge kingdom battles against kingdoms.
“It’s a full-scale MMO in mobile version,” says David Mohr, general manager of Gamevil Europe. “There aren’t many games like that for mobile devices.”
80 people working at full speed at the same time
The extensibility of Unity Editor allowed Gamevil to add custom tools to create events. The event tool made it possible for multiple users to work on the scenes simultaneously. They could define the logic of events and location, and create animations for kinematics.
To produce such a complex mobile MMO project with so many members on the team, a platform was needed that Gamevil could adapt to its workflow and processes throughout the organization.
“The Unity C #-based mode allows many people to work on multiple objects at the same time and minimizes the chances of unnecessary duplication,” says Byong Woon Jeon, the team leader responsible for the game’s battle designs. “With Royal Blood , we had 80 people working simultaneously in different areas of the game. As a result, things got much faster.”
A fantastic creature behind another
Another way Gamevil extended Unity Editor was with its own creature generator based on custom nodes. He used it together with the Mecanim tool and the Unity override function. This combination of tools allowed artists to create high quality images, optimized for mobile devices, 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 magicians, archers, warriors and interesting and attractive bards,” says Byong Woon.
However, at the same time and because it is an MMO, the server had to control the entire system continuously. Therefore, it was important that everything be as light as possible with a limited amount of memory.
The best tools for the best talent
Flexibility and extensibility were two reasons why Gamevil chose Unity to realize its AAA quality aspirations in the mobile world. A third reason is the ease of use of Unity. It makes it easier to find the outstanding talents in the market and, if they are not familiar with Unity, they can learn to use it quickly.
“Unity is more developer friendly than the other game engines I used before,” says Byong Woon. “Everything is integrated, there is no need to use other software. For example, that means that errors can be found and corrected directly in the editor up to two and three times faster than in other engines. In addition, the hierarchy greatly simplifies the organization. Even someone who uses it for the first time can understand and change the hierarchy of the system. “
