Mobile RTS interface: the story of how Hypemasters rediscovered the genre
Article written by Boris Kiselev & edited by Boris Kalmykov
For two years, we at Hypemasters have been working on ‘World War Armies’ — a mobile strategy title. Creating the interface has been one of our main challenges. We needed to find a compromise between classic PC strategy controls and convenience on mobile. Boris Kiselev, UX director at Hypemasters, shares how the studio managed to achieve a balance between the two.
In this article, I will share our experience of creating an interface for a mobile real-time strategy game(RTS). This is a rather unusual combination of genre and platform: there are very few similar examples in the mobile game market. I will talk about the difficulties we encountered in the production process, the mistakes we made and what we learned through this process.
Strategy game? What is that?
Let’s come to a mutual understanding, to begin with.
For PC players, RTS means games like Starcraft, Company of Heroes, Age of Empires, Blitzkrieg, Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War etc.
On mobile devices, a strategy game can be … well, almost anything. Let’s take a look at top Google Play games in the Strategy category:
The genre boundaries here are blurred. Generally, in mobile Strategy games, the gameplay is focused on developing the base, as well as selecting and upgrading units. In battle (if it exists as a separate activity at all), units usually act independently after being generated, without any player involvement. As a rule, players don’t have direct control over troops.
For the past two years, we at Hypemasters have been working on bringing the ‘true RTS’ genre to mobile. By ‘true RTS’, we mean a game that has:
- Real-time combat against real opponents
- A big battle map
- A relatively large number of units simultaneously participating in battle
- Direct control of units with free movement
- A tactical element
Mission (Im)possible
We can all agree, that “reviving the genre” sounds strong.
But there are a couple of caveats here.
RTS is one of the most hardcore genres. It implies a huge information load on the player and requires a large number of actions. You have to control several groups of units operating simultaneously in different parts of the map, while not forgetting about building new troops, developing your own economy and monitoring enemy movements.
To illustrate my point, the average APM (actions per minute) for professional Starcraft players is about 350, and for amateurs, it is about 70. Imagine if you had to perform the same amount of actions, not by clicking the mouse, but by tapping on the screen.
This is where the main difficulty in transferring RTS controls from PC to smartphones follows. Strategy games as a genre make the most of PC capabilities that mobile devices do not have.
It’s easy to get discouraged when you compare the functionality of the mouse + keyboard combo to what phones have to offer. See this for yourself:
This list calls into question the very possibility of transferring controls from a PC RTS to a mobile format without losing depth and flexibility.
Therefore, after some weeping, we were mentally ready to give up a part of the PC heritage in order to squeeze RTS into the mobile format.
At the same time, it was fundamentally important for us to preserve the spirit of the classic RTS and to find the fine balance between “simplified, but still RTS” and “not at all like a PC strategy”.
They say that you can find anything on Google Play, and PC-like strategies for phones are no exception. The market, although small, still exists. During our development, we kept an eye on Art of War 3 and Acies: Battle Runes. In both cases, the developers took the path of copying as much of the gameplay as possible from the classic PC strategies. In our opinion, this approach is not optimal, because it does not take into account the peculiarities of mobile platforms.
We think that in order for RTS to work on mobile, you will need to:
- Reduce the session duration from several hours to 15 minutes max
- Reduce the number of elements that need to be monitored at the same time
- Limit the maximum possible number of units participating in the battle at the same time to 15 on each side
Now, I will talk about a few of the problems we encountered and how they resulted in our final product being quite different to what we originally had planned.
Unit controls
In the early days of our game development, we established that units would be controlled directly. Selecting a single unit was supposed to be done by simply tapping on the model. Group selection could be done by using frames or a separate button (spoiler: as a result, almost all players only use single unit selection). We also wanted to keep the screen clean to show more of the game and less of the interface.
We learned almost immediately that on a phone screen the unit models were too small to tap on them with a finger. Camera zoom-in was not an option in our case:
Moreover, during the development process, new layers of information were added about the units. We wanted to display this information in battle, in addition to the standard HP.
In the beginning, the unit UI looked like this:
Later, we added portraits for each unit, combined with HP bars (the portrait was filled in by red colour as the unit received damage):
The amount of information about the units that we wanted to show in battle increased with each version. As result, for the release, the nameplate included:
- A unit callsign. This is how players can distinguish one tank from another (more on that below)
- A serial number. The first unit of the same type is called NAME-1, the second NAME-2, and so on. In theory, the number should help distinguish units of the same type from one another on the bottom panel.
- A class icon. Knowing exactly what kind of unit is in front of you is not enough, you also need to know how to use this unit. Who is this type good against and not so good against? But what if your enemy has this unit in battle but you have no idea how to play against it? The icon will help.
- Remaining little things: HP, unit level (outside of battle, units can be upgraded, and the one that has a higher level will be stronger in 1v1 combat), reload progress and a veterancy badge.
In addition to being displayed on nameplates, all information about the unit is duplicated on its portrait in the bottom panel. This helps players to monitor the state of the units without having to see them on their screen.
This is what it looks like:
As a result, players receive comprehensive information about the state of their army and have no difficulty controlling single units. However, there is still work to be done when it comes to group selections. At the moment, few players use them.
Identifying units
Our chosen setting implies the use of real-life technology models. This is very limiting in terms of visual design. When you have the ability to create units from scratch, you can reflect their functionality through appearance. A pumped-up warrior with a huge shield signal that he is slow and tenacious, and a thin elf with a large bow is seen as painfully striking, but frail physically, etc.
In our case, such an approach is impossible: any deviations from historically correct models result in military experts feeling excruciating mental pain. The more significant the discrepancies, the more negative reactions they cause. We still get comments from players saying that the shape of the barrel of a particular tank model does not match the real prototype, or that the calibre of the machine gun belt on the infantryman does not match his weapon. Historical accuracy brings about hard limits.
Fortunately, for the most part, our players are not military experts and, to put it mildly, are poorly versed in the technology of World War II. During playtests, it got ridiculous: one player took the M18 Hellcat (artillery) into battle instead of the M6 Heavy (heavy tank) saying, “Well, 18 must obviously be cooler than 6!”
Naturally, he lost the very first battle because of his choice of units.
At the same time, an identification mistake (say, sending infantry to attack an anti-personnel unit) for the player will result in the probable loss of the unit, and for us — the probable loss of the player.
At first, we tried to make it easier for players to navigate who is who, using different unit portraits in battle. It worked well with infantry, but vehicles of the same type (tanks, for example) still looked alike. Among our team, we called this the “boxes on wheels” problem.
We then added short callsigns that the player could refer to, in addition to the unit model.
Finally, after some time, class icons were added to the callsigns. Now, instead of memorising each unit separately, it was enough to figure out the class system once. As a result, we greatly simplified our players’ learning.
Here is what it looked like before:
And after:
The base and unit generation
Another good example of how initial ideas change during development is our story about the base. Initially, we agreed that the base building construction on it was an integral part of the ‘true’ RTS experience (this is what our competitors did too). We tried to transfer this mechanic to the mobile format with minimal changes. Therefore, in the early versions of our game, players had to construct specialised buildings, each with its own function: barracks to recruit soldiers, a factory for tanks, storage for resources, and etc. To interact with a building, players had to tap on it. After that a circular menu with action options opened:
This solution proved to be unviable. Recruiting units is a very frequent action that requires players to constantly move the camera from the battlefield to the base and back, which can be very annoying and distracting.
In our next iteration, we added a panel with three switchable modes: troops management, unit recruitment and construction. We saw this implemented in Acies: battle runes. Constructing a building still required moving the camera to the base, since most buildings could only be built within a small radius of the main building, but now it was possible to hire units at any time:
It got better, but operating the base still felt too labour-intensive and distracting. As a result, we took the path of simplification again. Instead of having the opportunity to use different buildings to generate any unit type in any battle, players now had to collect a deck of 8 units before the start of each battle. There were the only units that could be recruited in battle. We simplified the base to become one building. Upgrading the base opens up access to more expensive and advanced units from the deck and at the same speeds up resource growth.
Instead of a conclusion
We have been following an ambitious goal: to walk the fine line between casual and hardcore, making RTS accessible to mobile players, while preserving the feeling of classic PC strategy games. During the development process, we always had to be flexible. Each game element has gone through many iterations. Some things worked out well from the beginning, and others — did not so well. We still have a lot of work to do: we are only at the beginning of the journey.
Non-standard mobile projects like ours are always a complex challenge for the whole team. There is nowhere to look for ready-made solutions because they simply do not exist. You have to move through a path of trial, error and experimentation. However, it is these conditions that make it possible to catch the very feeling of being a pioneer and to discover something that no mobile developer has done before. I wish you to experience this feeling often in your work.
For those of you who want to evaluate the results of our work and the decisions we made, look for World War Armies on GooglePlay and Apple App Store.
If you have any questions or want to keep in touch, look for me on LinkedIn.
That’s all from me, thanks for your attention!
Yours, Boris Kiselev!
