It's an excellent method and it is possible to use gold to buy bonds. You can utilize bonds to pay for memberships and other forms of currency. This is still used in exactly the same way for mobile devices with OSRS Fire Cape, and we like the fact that lots of players utilize it to purchase a membership. It's an excellent method to get a feel for the game, and that is a great way to save money as well. Some of the stuff that we're introducing is added and we're not removing anything.

What's the longest time that the mobile port has been working on for?

How long is it? I'd guess it's been around five years, but maybe six. When we began this project idea, it was a massive concept and we were looking for ways to help we could get the game to mobile devices. It started by the challenge of figuring out how to make an UI on the display. This has turned out to be an epic because there have been many variations of it. If anyone has played through the beta, they'll notice the numerous modifications we've made over the many years. It's been a long road.

How did you integrate the complex menu system into a your mobile device?

I'm sure it would be great to have two action buttons that are displayed on the screen, with a mini-map and the ability to open your inventory in mid-combat, so you can have food, but on a tiny screen, has been the most significant for the team. It required a lot of iterations. I can remember our UX designer making a simple prototype that was displayed placed on a smartphone screen.

He would simply announce numbers that were linked to buttons on the mock-up and observe how fast you could reach each item by using your thumb. It would definitely increase in difficulty, so that you will feel like you're in Dance Dance Revolution by the close of the game, and achieve the most effective way to map buttons onto the display.

In the five years of development in the beginning, you were still developing the foundation game. What difficulties were there that you have to overcome when developing the game's content that you knew would one day become mobile-friendly, but wasn't as of yet?

To admit it, the majority of the issues we ran into were with older content. It was simple to modify, as it was designed from the beginning specifically with the mobile user in mind. Furthermore, the teas are being tested on mobile devices, which means they've developed a great knowledge of the best way to create content for desktop and mobile and how to keep up with the times. It's not possible to go through the 20 years of content to fix every single thing, due to obvious reasons, however some of the older content has issues using the right click mechanism on desktops.

It's still there it's just that on mobile devices, you can press and hold to bring the context menu. It's just an extra layer of education we must impart not only to the new players but also to desktop users who have stumbled across the mobile version but had never heard of it before. It's about ensuring that the player who is active and has a history using the desktop version does not feel confused when moving to mobile. They should feel comfortable and are able to make the same choices as they make on the desktop version.

What are the advantages of designing for mobile devices?

One of the issues we noticed earlier when watching games on smaller screen was the difficulty in reading. There are many employees and players and also find the text hard to comprehend. There are also people who have difficulties with accessibility. We didn't do a lot of work in addressing this, so one of the advantages with mobile devices with OSRS Boosting was that it helped us identify these issues and solve these issues. This is why we've made improvements like the aliasing that we use on text fonts in the game. It's also an option to transfer on the desktop. This is going affect all players and improve the overall legibility of the game significantly.