We had the pleasure of sitting down with Elke, the Producer of Travian: Legends Mobile, to gain insights into the app’s development journey. From the early stages of its conception to the challenges and triumphs along the way.
Read the interview and find out what lies ahead for the app’s future.
💬Can you share a bit about the time and effort involved in developing the Travian: Legends mobile app? How challenging has this process been?
🔷 From the first thoughts about a Travian: Legends app many years ago to the full release now, the team faced different development phases, all with their unique problems to solve, but also gaining more and more insights into what our players need most out of the app.
The app is supported by the Federal German Games Funding. This helped us immensely, but of course, came with its own restrictions and challenges, including when we were allowed to start with the project.
Once all paperwork was signed and the technical foundation laid, our focus turned towards making the main play cycles usable in the app– building and upgrading buildings, training and sending troops, and managing resources. Roughly in April 2022, with this in hand, we could show the earliest version of the app to actual players and continued to do so in several closed playtests and usability test rounds. This taught us a lot about what players need to see and reach fast in daily Travian life.
From there on, the features became more complex – I think one of the most difficult ones was alliances and confederacies as a multi-layer system. But also, the combat simulator gave us quite a headache, as there is a lot of information and possible settings to consider for such a small screen. Last but not least, the whole troop management, seeing incoming attacks and reacting to them – the heart of the game – is a topic we iterated quite a lot on and still keep improving.
The Early Access started in November 2023, and brought its own unique set of challenges – since the app was now constantly live and gained quite a lot of players, we had to consider carefully which updates were made to the main game, if that would break the app, and how to prepare our app-specific updates – a great test ground for live operations!
Finally, we launched the lobby. This was a whole big project of its own, but it made the app much more accessible and easier to use. We now also have the base to offer Google and Apple login in the future, for example.
Right now, we will shift attention from vanilla features to the special servers – I am sure this will again be a unique and quite interesting experience, and can’t wait to see the Europe map and eventually, Vikings, in the app.
💬 What are the key advantages of using the Travian: Legends mobile app compared to playing on a mobile browser or desktop browser?
🔷 The App is designed to work well on small screens without overcrowding them. Our UX designer works tirelessly with test groups and user feedback to ensure the most important information is in view and actions players need to do often are as smooth and fast as possible, while the less important parts are in secondary layers, for example, extra-tabs or popups.
We also use a lot of filters and touchscreen controls to utilize the advantages of an actual app client, as opposed to the mobile browser. Having a completely own front end gives us a lot more freedom to shift things around and experiment with different solutions.
I think the app is especially strong in addition to the browser version and allows players to react fast “on the go” without having to return to a PC for every action.
The beauty of being cross-platform is that you can use whichever version suits you best in the situation and don’t have to stick to any one of them. We hope the app will be an additional “tool”, so to say, to stay connected to the game and your alliance. And maybe some old players even find it in the app store and return for another round!
💬 What was your favorite part of creating this mobile version of Travian: Legends?
🔷 When I joined the project, there was this huge list of features, buildings, and other things needed for the app that was created for the funding application. It was quite impressive and showed how complex Travian Legends is.
The list also was very useful to check where we stand compared to where we need to be. Needless to say, there was a lot of red in there, and the list even grew over time as the browser game introduced new features and improvements, or we discovered some additional things missing that nobody had thought of before.
As you can imagine, this felt like an insurmountable wall at times. But then, it didn’t. Lines started turning green. We could offer the app in playtests, then even in early access. Players stayed in the app longer and longer, which was a sign that we were getting close to a state where the whole game was playable in the app. This was very exciting already.
And finally, after some hassles with the App Store, we did the release! It is out there, for everybody to find and play. What a step forward! There are still some red spots here and there in the original list, and truth be told, we have a new, fairly red list for the annual special servers waiting for us now, but it feels amazing to have achieved the first big goal and see the player numbers constantly rise.
There are even players who are only playing with the app now, which is amazing! I hope we can make it worthwhile for them and all of you and keep delivering what you need for an excellent on-the-go experience.
💬 Can you tell us more about push notifications? Will they be introduced to the mobile app? What is the strategy behind this decision?
🔷 Push notifications are a great addition to any app, especially if players maintain control over how many and which ones they want to get. I want to have them, too, and we already have a preliminary list full of ideas.
However, especially for a highly strategic cross-platform game like Travian: Legends, we also want to proceed with caution, so they don’t upset the gameplay or give unfair advantages. We are also considering implementing the same notifications for the desktop when we go for it.
In addition, some of the push notifications we would like to offer will require changes in the backend, for example when storage is full. Currently, the game only knows that the storage is full after the player enters the gameworld again, so this would need to be made into a more active system.
All these reasons led us to delay the topic until after the app release. We now have a better foundation to work with and will soon put our heads together to figure out the best way forward.
💬 Is the mobile app compatible with all servers and event types? If not, when can players expect full compatibility?
🔷 Our first big goal was to be compatible with regular vanilla servers and make the design for the core features as smooth and solid as possible. Now that we are very close to this, it is time to look at the past and upcoming specials.
Many of them share as a common foundation the Europe map and regions, victory points, ancient powers, and so on, so we will start with these shared basics. From there we will work our way up towards the concrete AS24, introducing ships and Vikings to the App! From there on, we should be able to keep up with Community Weeks, new Years Specials and Annual Specials.
As I mentioned, it is still a big red list now, but we aim to have this turn green and ready by the end of the year.
Conclusion:
Elke and her team have poured their hearts into the Travian: Legends mobile app, navigating a maze of challenges. We’re excited to see how it grows and how you will use it to conquer their next victories. Stay tuned!
