On a storyteller’s knight: Why story, not micromanagement, is driving CherryWorm’s new idle RPG

The role-playing game genre is one of the popular and lucrative across all platforms. In such a crowded market, it can be challenging to stand out. So how does a new game compete?

Up-and-coming studio CherryWorm has several novel ideas. From using indie PC portal itch.io for market validation to rethinking the most common game mechanics, the studio is focused on giving the project the best possible chance of success.

PocketGamer.biz sat down with the team to find out more about their approach to High On Knights.

PocketGamer.biz: High On Knights utilised Itch.io as an ‘early validation step.’ What specific feedback regarding the game’s theme, tone, or characters from that community gave you the green light to commit to a full-scale mobile development?

CherryWorm: We used Itch.io and the official website primarily as an early validation for our visual direction and tone.

Through pre-registrations, email surveys, and feedback from industry peers at game events, we consistently received strong responses to the game’s atmosphere. Many people were curious about our characters, and the rabbit is their favourite role. On one of the platforms, our rabbit received over 1,000 likes.

Although our art style is uncommon in mobile games, it felt both familiar and intriguing to players, which we saw as a strong early signal. Small-scale tests on Meta and Google Ads further confirmed that this direction could support user acquisition on mobile.

You are currently in active development for a Google Play soft launch within the next six months. What are the primary KPIs or player behaviours you will be monitoring during this phase to determine if the ‘absurd’ world of the game is resonating with a wider mobile audience?

Our primary KPIs for the first soft launch are UA cost and Day-1 retention. For a mobile game, this is the most important step, as most players will come from ad platforms like Google Ads and Meta.

That means our gameplay must be designed to perform well within UA environments from the start.

These metrics give us the fastest and most efficient signal to evaluate whether the gameplay and characters go well with players.

Another metric we care about is whether players are willing to talk about the game — recommending it to friends or discussing it online.
This kind of signal usually only becomes visible at scale, so we expect to evaluate it more clearly when we run larger UA campaigns.

Your strategy involves a heavy focus on Meta and Google Ads for User Acquisition (UA). How has knowing your primary traffic sources from the start influenced the art style and the ‘hook’ of the game's initial user experience?

Our target audience is mobile players in T1 markets, so early on we studied both their preferences in cartoon and game styles, as well as the types of UA creatives that perform well in those markets.

We believe strong character design, a unique art style, humorous elements, and a clear gameplay hook are critical to capturing RPG players’ attention. We add some mad ideas in this game, too. All of these need to be demonstrated on the market.

We demonstrate it step by step, from industry friends to a market test on the Ads platform. And we get a lot of responses, and also happy that people love this idea and this art style, and they give a lot of suggestions on our crazy subject. The cost performance of our ad creatives is good, driven mainly by our art style and narrative-focused creatives. Then it is time to move on to the next step.

A core theme of your development is storytelling versus micromanagement. Why do you believe that removing repetitive, mechanical tasks actually makes for a more engaging experience, and how does it strengthen the player's connection to the characters?

Removing micromanagement shifts the player’s role from operator to observer and guide.

Instead of repeating low-value actions, players focus on shaping character growth, long-term outcomes and game events.

In terms of character survival, we also take a more realistic design. Unlike many RPGs, where adventures are isolated experiences, our dungeons actively consume a hero’s attributes, including health, happiness, and HP, and these states are preserved when they return to the camp.

This turns the camp into a meaningful continuation of the adventure. When heroes come back, players need to pay closer attention to their condition—providing food, rest, entertainment, and making sure the camp’s buildings are upgraded enough to support them efficiently.

Through this design, character survival becomes closely tied to the player’s decisions. As a result, players develop a stronger sense of responsibility and a deeper emotional connection with their heroes.

You’ve described an ‘authentically running town’ where heroes act on their own. How does this autonomous behaviour contribute to the narrative? Do the heroes ever do things that genuinely surprise the player (or the developers)?

Right now, our main narrative is still told through dungeon adventures, using a more traditional and stable story structure.

The camp is designed for smaller, more fragmented stories. This part is still in development. Our focus is on character relationships. Through autonomous behaviour, heroes can create small, sometimes funny moments that make their personalities and relationships feel more alive. It will be a pleasant time when observing the camp.

You mentioned identifying ‘emotional gaps’ that current idle RPGs fail to fill. What are those specific gaps, and how is High On Knights designed to capture the hearts of players who might feel "burnt out" by existing idle titles?

For us, the “emotional gap” is the feeling that the characters—and the world itself—need the player.

To support this, we designed both a survival system and an autonomously running camp system. The world continues to function on its own, but it relies on the player’s decisions to stay healthy and balanced.

As players observe how the camp operates, they can see characters' relationships, behaviours, and personalities, and even imagine the stories behind them. If characters are defeated by monsters outside the camp, players need to help them grow stronger to keep the entire camp in a healthy state. As the game continues to evolve online, we will keep expanding and enriching this system.

The player acts almost like a god in the world. Our long-term goal is to support different development paths, allowing each player to shape a unique camp and set of character relationships—so no two worlds feel the same.

When researching the current mobile market, how do you decide which ‘standard’ RPG features are essential and which are actually friction that should be discarded to keep the gameplay loop mobile-friendly?

For us, the soul of an RPG is not numbers, systems, or even story—it’s whether players truly feel they are playing a role, and whether the world responds to that role.

Many games have beautiful characters and complex systems, but still feel boring because players are only operating systems, not becoming someone. They are “doing things,” instead of being a character.

When evaluating standard RPG features, we keep what strengthens role-playing feedback and remove what turns into pure friction. For example, instead of abstract values like ‘+10 stamina / –10 happiness’, our characters show human states. After an adventure, they can become tired or hungry, sit by a campfire to eat, or go to a tavern to drink and relax with others.

Characters are not tools—they are social beings in this game. They're happy, sad, and all kinds of moods matter, and the game world will respond to these states.

Growth in High On Knights is multi-dimensional, not just about becoming stronger. Numerical progression exists to serve player experience, not to burden it. This is also why many modern players feel exhausted by overly large and bloated RPG systems.

You treat UA, design, and ads as one connected system. How does this integrated workflow change the way you balance the game? For instance, do you adjust the story beats based on what you see performing well in your ad creative?

Yes, absolutely. We treat UA, design, and advertising as one connected system rather than separate stages. This approach allows us to evolve the game quickly and continuously optimise long-term ROI per user.

When creating UA creatives, we usually explore two main directions: story-driven scenarios and core gameplay-focused clips. Feedback from story-driven creatives helps us shape the tone and emotional direction of the game, while gameplay-focused creatives inform us which mechanics are worth deeper investment and iteration.

Your monetisation is an evolution of traditional RPG models adapted for a hybrid structure. How do you ensure the monetisation feels fair and stable for a loyal player base while still benefiting from the broader reach of a hybrid/idle game?

Our monetisation evolves traditional RPG models rather than replacing them. It reduces early friction and increases tolerance for player mistakes, which helps retention for mid-spending and low-spending players.

At the same time, it doesn’t conflict with long-term RPG progression, so monetisation stays fair and stable for our players.

In a mobile market dominated by massive, IP-driven RPGs, how are you ensuring your original ‘quirky’ characters have enough personality to drive long-term retention and monetisation?

Creating a new IP is extremely challenging, especially in a market dominated by large, IP-driven RPGs. I can’t guarantee that our characters will immediately become iconic, but what I can guarantee is our commitment to consistently delivering distinctive, high-quality content over time.

In my previous project at my old company, I was in charge of a game whose content was updated for over ten years. By using evolving stories and dynamic RPG content, we were able to keep players engaged long-term. Around the fifth year of that project, the game expanded into an animated series, which reached over 10 billion views online and, in turn, drove sustained growth back into the game’s revenue.

Another key factor is cost control. This is one of the main reasons we chose a 2D production pipeline. For a small team like ours, maintaining creative independence and delivering frequent updates requires strict control over content costs and a clear balance between production investment and future returns. Only with disciplined cost management can we steadily build an original IP over time.

The visual identity of a game is often its first ad. How did you land on the specific art style for High On Knights, and how does it support the relaxed and absurd feeling you want players to have?

When we started the project, we wanted to build on a familiar foundation - what we often call a “classic” theme, so it will build a solid longterm audience. That’s why we chose Western fantasy, heroic figures, a prince’s revenge story, and a touch of medieval humour.

Then we studied globally influential animated works and distilled visual elements that felt familiar but could be reinterpreted in our own way. The result is an art style built on recognisable foundations, with small but intentional twists that add humour and personality.

Once we had early visuals, we tested them with our target audience. Many people were immediately drawn to our CG, and that moment gave us confidence that this was the right direction.

For other indie developers looking to move from a PC validation mindset into a data-led mobile strategy in 2026, what is the one most important market reality they need to accept before they start development?

The most important market reality is that mobile players behave very differently from PC players, and small teams need to respect that from day one.

For indie teams, it’s safer to choose a proven genre that isn’t winner-takes-all, where mid-tier teams can still survive.

Another key reality is distribution. On mobile, most UA still comes from paid ads for new games.

That means teams must respect how mobile ads work: communicating the core fun and identity of the game within a very short time frame. It also means accepting that many ad creatives will fail—one should always be trying to find the right way out of lots of failures of creatives.

Finally, market feedback can and should influence development decisions. Teams need to constantly keep the audience in mind—understanding how players think and what excites them, both inside and outside the game.

Running market tests early can save significant resources and help teams avoid going too far in the wrong direction and wasting unnecessary budget.