Creating ‘The World of Shadows’ Game

The goal for our game, World of Shadows was simple: Design a gamer’s game inspired by what our development team already liked and played, yet was unique in the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). But in a mobile browser.

We knew that Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft had everything that a lover of fantasy and adventure could ever need, including raids and dungeons that were unrivaled in their epic scope, an excellent PvP system, balanced character classes, and a game world with a cool story — what more could you ask for? What is the modern gamer missing? The answer was mobility.

Imagine beautifully realized art assets, an amazing, lengthy storyline, an enormous amount of content to master, items, ancient artifacts, gear sets, pets, dungeons, and much more, all on your mobile phone. There was no mobile game that was truly captivating in the free-to-play niche.

As such, we decided that every fantasy-lover with a phone – whether it was a smartphone or a feature phone via browser – should be able to play World of Shadows whenever they wanted without sacrificing the experience of a full-scale PC game. However, as is often the case when companies seek to blaze the trail of development, there were specific challenges to this development.

For example, the development team set a goal to itself to create a UI for both device types – feature phones and smartphones. We considered two ways to realize this goal: 1) create unique markup for each type of device (based on resolution) and automatically switch between markups using WURFL or similar technologies; and 2) find a way to create adaptive/universal markup that could suit any device or browser, and just adapt some markup elements in runtime (buttons, images, etc.) without switching the whole markup.

The team knew from experience with the first option that it demanded more efforts to support and develop game UI. What’s more, we could not update the user UI in online mode using this option. In other words, in order to update a user’s UI (status, health, log, UI elements, etc.), he would have to perform an operation to create a browser request to the server, because feature phone mobile browsers like Opera Mini do not support scripts and other features of “big” PC-browsers like Flash. This issue imposed several restrictions in game design, game mechanics, and game UI organization, because the user had to perform actions and refresh a browser to keep the UI updated. This issue also seriously affected all mechanics where users should be synchronized in time (for example, the preparation and start of dungeons, arenas, etc., in a group of players). The third and primary issue with this option was GPRS network lag: you cannot be sure that all of users have the same good connection. For example, some regions only offer the EDGE network, which would create a slow experience for players, while their opponent could be one of our ‘hardcore’ gamers, who use their PCs with excellent network connection to dominate in the game.

To strike a balance between low-network and good network players we found optimal timings for fighting actions – the player would have to wait about 4-6 seconds to inflict maximum damage. In game design and UI it was presented as following: frequent strikes lead to a slight damage and misses, and discreet adjusted hits cause the most damage. Of course, if a significant proportion of the user base has low network connection, a developer would have to optimize all type of content (texts, images) in terms of resolution and download size.

The Starting Line

We created a system of towns, each with its own quests (and accompanying storylines), shops, dungeons to explore with other players for a taste of combat, and a PvP arena and duels to bolster the player's competitive spirit.

The character screen

Earlier games were using simple “avatars” for characters, but we chose a different path. We wanted every player to see how their character changed when he donned the "Armor of Fury" or the “Blade of a Thousand Truths.”  That's how we came up with the idea of having a full visualized heroes and making sure that every item a character equips on it would look like it belonged there.

Plus, you can combine all the items with each other to give you a specific advantage over your enemies in the form of stat increases, bonuses that enhance skills (in our case skills = Amulets) or completely change how one of the player's skills works, or even an extra percent to the player's leveled-up talents. The bonus set mechanic was unique to our game at the time; all our competitors had Sets that were just collections of items that would give a + to stats and had no other benefit for the player.

The graphical essence of an online game (especially in browser games like ours) is very important, since it's the main thing that attracts the majority of players — the user sees a mighty hero decked out in epic gear with a huge sword and shield and he already starts to relate to him, and wants to enter into that role.

Everyone finds something of their own in the game. One player might want to feel like a technological genius or a magician who uses cogwheels and a steam-powered magical machine gun that rapid-fires arcane arrows. A unique feature in this game is the background area where the player is located in can change (no other browser-based game has the ability to dynamically (depends on the game situation) change the backgrounds the character mannequin is standing in front of in this way). The game features lush, varied locations, from volcanic areas, to fairytale woods, to an arena, to portals into other dimensions that can be accessed with a VIP account. From development prospective we created a simple JPG generation module that combines several layers of alfa-transparent supported PNG pictures into the different resolutions JPG pictures for any type of browsers supported.

The image below shows a player equipped with two items – shoulders and armor; and a player equipped with a full set of five items - shoulders, armor, helmet, weapon and shield: 

At this point, readers might be wondering which mechanics are most in demand among gamers. The answer is PvP Combat.

At first, the dueling field was a place where people could chat before finding an opponent to fight. This mechanic didn't turn out to be especially popular because the UI was too complex – the aftermath of browser-based architecture when you cannot simply synchronize players. So, after taking another look at the UI and mechanic, it was decided to cut and simplify flexible but hardcore duel UI/mechanics replacing them with a simple single-click matchmaking mechanic. We feared that such simplicity could scare core players but actually the duels really came to life and became very popular. Beyond simple fun, this was also motivated by the inclusion of exclusive items that could only be found on the dueling field + the separate duel rating.

As a gameplay, duels against other players take the form of real-time battles where the winner is the player who can select amulets (skills) and use them against his opponent as quickly and strategically as possible. Another major role in these battles is played by potions, which can save your life or give you a temporary advantage in battle (buff).

Matchmaking time on the dueling field is only about 2–10 seconds — just one touch, and the system finds your opponent according your duel rating and gear and starts the battle.

Co-Op Gameplay

In our game, dungeons are the main attraction and the most popular mechanic, allowing players to find each other by searching for parties for specific dungeons, then buying up some buffs and getting ready for an interesting ‘dungeon dive.’ Classically, dungeons allow players to organize for co-operative gameplay – even at the early levels – so as to improve socialization and user retention.

Once in the dungeon, the battle begins in real-time with waves of enemies and demons throwing themselves at the players, and the party fights on with the goal of making it to the boss and beating him, thereby shutting the gates to the dungeon for a while and earning rewards that they can put on their characters to make them stronger. For the dungeons in World of Shadows, we utilized classical “need-greed” loot mechanics. We also added three levels of difficulty for each of dungeon, allowing players to choose between easy mode and poor item quality, normal mode and good items, and heroic mode with brutal item quality. We also deployed achievements and ranking systems to  motivate players to farm different dungeons. As a result, World of Shadows dungeons mechanics became the most popular gameplay in the game. In the near future, we plan to add dungeon mastery challenges to motivate players into being the best in specific dungeon farming over time.

As in any other MMO, World of Shadows has a robust system of achievements that serve not just as a way to get a place on the leaderboard and feel good about yourself — “check it out, I did it, hurray for me,” but also a way to show your friends what you've accomplished so they can try to reach the heights that you've already reached. The achievement points you earn can also be used to obtain rare items from the Academy of Achievements; there's no other way to get these items in the game. In future updates, players will get stat bonuses for their achievements. That's our way of teaching the player to set goals and reach them, becoming stronger and better at the game. From monetary point of view, this kind of motivation significantly boosts retention and player lifetime (6-36 months for a core player), boosting lifetime value (LTV). Each reached achievement gives player new perspectives and motivates the player to reach another step with good rewards and bonuses, as well as get to a new level of reputation among the game community.

HTML5 and the future of gaming

As is obvious from our strategy, we believe that HTML5 and CSS3 technology makes playing time more enjoyable, as it helps animate backgrounds in all areas of the game, and enables quick effects during combat.  Moreover, we believe that in future high bandwidth mobile networks (e.g. LTE) and the further development of browser technologies will significantly change the mobile game market. Making the first steps toward this future, we animated all game backgrounds and added CSS3 features to our markup that now gives players with smartphones extended user experience: now players can live in the dynamic World of Shadows game with fires, non-static characters, erupting lava, drifting clouds and other effects such dynamic buttons, progress bars, etc., which provides a user experience very similar to native applications.

Being able to penetrate the “heavy” markets such as Europe and USA will require additional visual affects for battles, dungeons, mobs, enchants, sound effects and more. We are looking forward to meeting this demand moving forward.

Conclusion

The next phase of World of Shadows will be expanding it worldwide and enabling different languages to interact with it, as it is currently only available in Russian. This will also come with its own challenges, which we are excited to tackle and work through. 

Fortunately, our entire team of developers and game designers contribute to game development. In fact, for World of Shadows, every member wrote their own quest! For example, one of our programmers came up with the idea for a dungeon that players could never get to the end, but only to a certain wave, and after every update and with new items and higher stats the players would keep trying to get through this dungeon. Lots of players got killed in this battle that seemed like it would never end, and then suddenly one party of players made it through the dungeon and won a prize from the administrators (they all got individualized personal content that doesn't exist anywhere else in the game). We love seeing players striving to reach their goals, and we reward our favorite players for this.

The team is also experimenting with Ajax in our games, and believes that the future everything that happens in the browser will be updated without clicking links (buttons) or refreshing pages. Imagine real, "real-time" action in a browser-based game — now that would be really convenient and awesome! Here’s to being on top of what’s next!