Royal Blood: A Unity for Mobile games case study
When Gamevil set a strategic goal to close the gap between high-quality PC games and mobile ones, they needed one flexible platform that all their in-house studios could use to innovate efficiently. Unity delivered everything Gamevil needed to bring AAA quality to mobile devices.
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The game
Royal Blood, an MMORPG mobile game developed by in-house team, Lean Studio
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The goal
To close the gap between PC graphics and mobile graphics
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Platforms
iOS, Android
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Team members
100+
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Location
Headquartered in Seoul and Los Angeles
Members of the Gamevil team talk about the challenges of creating a AAA-quality MMO game for mobile.
AAA quality arrives on mobile
Gamevil’s diverse platform of hundreds of innovative mobile games have been downloaded over 500 million times. When Gamevil’s internal team at Lean Studios kicked off their current full-scale MMO mobile project, Royal Blood in 2015, they chose to create it with Unity because of the platform’s flexibility, extensibility and ease of use.
The results:
- 80 people working simultaneously on Royal Blood project
- Extended with tools that enabled artists to quickly modify characters and environments on their own
- Can detect and fix bugs directly from console 2-3 times faster than with previous solution
- Royal Blood won Best Graphics Award at MWU Korea Awards 2017
A rich world in the palm of the hand
Gamevil has 500+ people working in 14 offices around the world. Predicting that the surge of popularity in MMORPG games in Asia will be followed in the West, they set a team of over 80 to work on developing Royal Blood, an ambitious MMORPG game for mobile.
Among other things, the game will feature a dynamic open world where you can join in live online quests with hundreds of other players and take part in huge Realm vs. Realm battles.
“It’s a full-scale MMO in mobile,” says David Mohr, general manager at Gamevil Europe. “There’s not a lot of games like that in mobile.”

80 people working full speed ahead at the same time
The Unity Editor’s extensibility enabled Gamevil to add custom tools for creating events. The event tool allowed multiple users to work on scenes simultaneously. They could set event logic and location and create animations for the cut scenes.
Producing such a complex MMO mobile project with so many team members required a platform that Gamevil could adapt to their pipeline and processes across the entire organization.
“The C#-based modality of Unity allows many people to work on multiple objects simultaneously and minimizes the chances of unnecessary duplications,” says Byong Woon Jeon, Team Leader for the game’s battle designs. “With Royal Blood, we’ve had 80 people working simultaneously on different areas of the game, and as a result, we are getting things done much faster.”

One fantastic creature after another
Another way Gamevil extended the Unity Editor was with their own customized node-based creature creator, which they used together with Unity’s mecanim and override. This combination of tools enabled their artists to create high-quality visuals, which were optimized for mobile, 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 interesting and compelling wizards, archers, warriors and bards,” says Byong Woon.
At the same time though, because it’s an MMO, the server had to control the whole system continuously, making it important to keep it as light as possible with a limited amount of memory.
The best tools for the best talent
Flexibility and extensibility were two reasons Gamevil chose Unity to meet their AAA ambitions in the mobile world. A third reason is Unity’s ease of use, which makes it easier to find the top-class talent out there, and if they’re not familiar with Unity already, to quickly get them up to speed.
“Unity is more developer-friendly than other game engines we’ve used in the past,” says Byong Woon. “Everything is integrated; there’s no need to use other software. So for example, that makes it two or three times faster to find and fix bugs directly in the editor. And the hierarchy really simplifies organization. Even a first-time user can understand and change the hierarchy in the system.”