How Rockbite Games transformed its idle game into an idle RPG

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Avetis Zakharyan and Gevorg Kopalyan are founders at Rockbite Games.

Idle Outpost is doing great – especially for its niche – and we honestly love it to bits. And there’s still a lot more we want to build. But funnily enough, this whole journey started with one simple idea: what if we added rush events?

Once we actually launched the feature, it became clear pretty fast – without bigger gameplay changes behind it, rush events just weren’t going to deliver. That’s when we took on a much bigger challenge: basically overhauling the game without scaring off our core players.

The project was never a “classic” idle game to begin with, but it also wasn’t a full-blown RPG. Players spent most of their time trading and upgrading stations. Combat? Not so much.

But we were seeing better ARPU from RPG features, and we were actively looking for new growth points – both in gameplay and monetisation. So we decided to lean harder in that direction.

Of course, there was some risk in all this. We weren’t sure if the shift in focus would go over well with our target audience. But looking back now, we can safely say it worked. Players are diving into boss fights and exploring the RPG systems with way more enthusiasm.

And no, we weren’t trying to hit some magical “boost all metrics and player interest overnight” button. The main goal was to lay down a strong foundation for future features – and not mess up what was already doing well.

Creating a home base and the daily routine that came with it

One of the first big changes players see now when logging in is the new home base. Before this, the experience was kinda chaotic. You’d bounce between trade levels, fight screens, gear upgrades, buttons overlapped, stuff got messy, and it was easy to get lost.

So we decided to bring some order to the chaos. Now, there’s a home screen where everything comes together – your base. It shows your progress, your status, available activities, bonuses – everything in one place.

You see your avatar in full battle gear they’re currently wearing, plus a mannequin showing your trading outfit and how much profit you’re pulling in. Below are two big buttons: “Go to Work” (for trade levels) and “Missions” (for PvE and PvP).

What it did is make the dual-core gameplay – trade and combat – instantly clear to the players once they land in the home base. You go do your thing, whatever it may be, then return to base to regroup and decide what’s next.

Besides it being a great way to declutter game menus and sections, the home base gave us a way to structure an intuitive daily routine for the player. We added a daily missions tab right to the home screen – a checklist with tasks and rewards.

We did our homework: looked at how our competitors handle dailies, crunched the numbers on how many and which placements our players watch daily, and came up with a system that makes sense.

The plan was simple – show players what they can do today, what’s worth watching, what tasks to hit, and where the rewards are hiding.

So here’s how it plays out: log in, see your red marker on the task list – the first mission is just showing up, so you collect your reward. From there, you check what’s next: maybe it’s upgrading peaceful gear, spending shovels on combat equipment, clearing the arena, or hitting PvE missions. Every completed task is marked red, pointing the player in the right direction in line with their goals. 

The main idea behind this structure was to encourage players to build a habit similar to a morning routine: wake up, brush your teeth, grab a coffee, go to work. And that kind of daily routine? That’s what drives long-term retention.

Most of these little missions also come with ad-based bonuses. Fight three times for free in the arena? Great. Want two more runs? Watch an ad.

In total, for players to hit the most amount of bonuses, we’ve got around 20 placements per day baked into the flow – but we made sure the whole routine doesn’t take more than 45 minutes. It’s dense but not exhausting.

We’ve counted on the daily routine to boost our retention and ad views, and yeah – it’s already working. Both retention and ad views are up by a few percent. R1-R3 lifted by about 3%, and later days are seeing even better results. Not bad for the start.

But the biggest win? The home base and daily objectives gave us a rock-solid foundation. A clear structure to build new features on top of.

From Idle… to Idle RPG

As we said earlier – the core player base spent most of their time trading and upgrading stations, rarely touching combat. But we really wanted to shift that balance and diversify the experience without turning players off or blowing up the flow. That’s how we came up with “save a character”.

Here’s how it works: there’s a special upgrade tab in trading levels. That’s where you improve goods to make more money and buff characters so they work better.

It used to just say “hire a character”. Now, there’s also a mission – “save a character”. It plays out like this: your character’s been snatched by a bandit or a zombie – and you’ve gotta get them back. Until you do, progress is frozen. No upgrades, no new income. You want to keep growing? You’ve got to fight.

This rescue mission turns into a full-on boss battle in a designated location. Bosses have strength indicators, and if you’ve been skipping combat upgrades to go trade? Good luck.

But here’s the kicker: these bosses wear premium gear, usually from future sets – it’s basically a live showcase of stuff the player can eventually earn. It’s a sneaky, effective bit of set marketing that can be folded into the live ops calendar. We’ll get to that in a second.

Now, we’d actually had a full universe and lore for Idle Outpost mapped out in docs for ages, but barely any of it made it into the game. This gave us a way to finally start using it. Each boss is built around the lore – they’ve all got their own backstories, and each of the 19 locations has its own boss and henchmen.

There are also three super-rare elite bosses. When you beat them, they don’t die – they escape, setting up future encounters. Feels kinda old-school in the best way.

First, you fight off the henchmen, and then the boss shows up near the end of the zone to finish the job personally – flexing the coolest gear, of course. That gear? Coming soon to a live ops event near you.

If a boss is too strong for you, there is no shame in retreating. Head back to home base, grab some shovels, upgrade your loadout, and come back stronger. After the recent updates, nothing’s gonna come easy if you don’t toughen up as a warrior, not even trading.

We also added a small experiment: during boss fights, players can watch an ad to pick one of three buffs. The players, overall, dug it. We managed to layer the systems in a way where they don’t clash, they support each other.

When you’re trading, you’re laser-focused on station upgrades. When you’re on a mission, it’s all about the fight.

So, what else is cooking?

Next up, we’re putting together a proper live ops calendar, one that lays out what’s going to happen in the game over the next 100 days. When the events start, what you get out of them, what kinds of bonuses to expect – everything will be spelled out in advance.

Our hope is that with a clear calendar, players will stay more engaged, and we’ll be able to plan content – and revenue – more confidently.

Right now, we’ve got Rush events and standard LTEs running, but we’re also starting to group them into larger themed events. We actually tested this over the New Year with a mega-event that combined Rush and LTE into one thing. It did great.

So now, we’re looking to make those kinds of events a regular thing – with exclusive sets as rewards that you can’t get anywhere else.

We’ve also completely overhauled the arena. Now it has clearly defined time windows for seasons, revamped rankings, and instead of servers, we’ve divided the whole thing into fight zones.

We tightened up the balance and arena ticket distribution – so that newbies have a reason to jump in, and seasoned players still get a good challenge. Plus, the arena’s no longer a separate module, it’s part of the “Missions” tab, right alongside all the combat stuff.

The PvE section under “Missions” also got a glow-up. Now you fight zombies in a subway setting – think Neo vs. agent Smith vibes. You get three fights a day, and two extra if you watch an ad.

The bigger vision here is to gradually expand the Missions tab into a full ecosystem of battle modes. Make it one of the anchors of the game, not just a side gig.

Speaking of new modes – the first one is already in the works. We’re taking our most popular creative and turning it into a Tower Defense mode. Imagine hordes of zombies charging your base while you hold them off with a squad of heroes. Not just one hero – several at once.

This checks a bunch of boxes. First, it pushes us deeper into RPG territory – active combat where your choices really matter, unlike the Arena mode. Second, it gives players a reason to collect more characters. It’s kind of like building a mini-CCG on top of the core game. More depth, more monetisation potential.

Looks like the experiment is working

So, what did we end up with?

First off, we reworked the UI and introduced the home base. That’s now the player’s main hub – all the daily, familiar stuff lives there. Anything gameplay-related – whether it’s trading or fighting – lives in the “Go to Work” and “Missions” tabs.

The idea was to gently nudge the game in the direction we wanted: more depth, more variety. But without breaking what already worked. And, so far, we think we managed to pull it off. The game now feels like a real RPG – you want to finish it, you’ve gotta upgrade, gear up, become a beast.

At the core, this whole system is a springboard – a framework that we can use to layer in more gameplay depth, evolve our meta, and develop smarter monetisation paths. It’s a base we can really build on.