ROE Mobile, Developer's Log

Earth date 2.2.2013

HELLO REALM OF EMPIRES PLAYERS!
Thank you for not abandoning ROE despite months of silence from the development team!

Back in spring 2012, we had an ambitious plan - to bring ROE to mobile devices to allow you to check on your empire no matter where you are.

As suggested by you guys, we wanted to create a version of Realm of Empires that could be played on all, or at least majority of devices.


HTML5 to the rescue!
With the arrival or HTML5 compliant mobile devices, this goal appeared achievable. Rather than create a number of native mobile apps (one app for iPhone, another for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and so on), we decided to create a mobile friendly HTML5 version of Realm of Empires.

The irresistible appeal of HTML5
Realm of Empires is already an HTML game - that is why you play it in your favorite browser. HTML5 being a new version/standard of HTML, made it natural fit. The big and irresistible bonus of this approach, was our hope that all our innovations for the mobile platform, can be applied directly and immediately to the current desktop game!

We had great plans to progressively improve the desktop version as well. Alas! it was not to be! 

HTML5 on mobile turned out to be much more complicated than expected. There are many incompatibilities between the devices, HTML5 support is spotty, often not as advertised, there are many known and presisten bugs, etc.

In addition, very few people are trying to accomplish something similar - we are one of the few pioneers. Exploring the wild is fun and exiting, but also means you are rather alone in the wild!

All effort to mobile!

Because of all these difficulties, we had to direct all out effort had to the mobile project and we had to delay  applying our innovations to the desktop game.

We were hoping that we can reuse a lot of existing screens (just move things around on the screen, make it more mobile-friendly) but we have found it impossible to provide a snappy and intuitive user interface ( UI ) on mobile devices this way. We had to create a unique UI for mobile devices.

Where we are today?

I am happy to say, that we will be publishing the mobile interface soon. I wish I could tell you, that we have all the features that you have enjoyed on the desktop. Unfortunately, a lot of power features are still missing - like summary pages or mass features. Those are our next priority, please bear with us!

So what about the desktop version of the game?

We were not yet able to apply our innovations to the desktop version of the game, but the changes are compatible and we will be improving the desktop game in the near future. The improvements will be very significant too! A completely redone map - think "google maps". State-full application (no constant page refreshes needed, instant notification of attacks or new mail ). Much, much faster user interface. And many more such  improvements.

Interested in some technical details?

I rant about many of the issues on twitter

Sneak Peak? OK, OK