‘DomiNations’ Brings Classic Strategy To Mobile

The mobile game market is seeing an amazing amount of new games coming out every week, and it’s getting more difficult than ever to get noticed in this avalanche of games. One thing that helps is a pre-existing audience, either for the style of game, the game’s creators, or the content of the game. Big Huge Games today introduced DomiNations, which the company is hoping will resonate on all three points.

DomiNations is certainly reminiscent of Rise of Nations, the hit real-time strategy game created by the original Big Huge Games and published by Microsoft back in 2003. DomiNations; like its spiritual predecessor, lets you create and grow civilizations through history, and of course battle other players for resources and territories. This is an extremely popular genre of games on the PC, and certainly mobile games like Clash of Clans and Game of War owe a lot to this genre.

The creators of DomiNations are led by Brian Reynolds and Tim Train, veterans who’ve worked on games like Civilization, Alpha Centauri, and of course Rise of Nations. Their games have a devoted following which is certainly going to want to look at DomiNations. The historic content of the game ia something nearly everyone is familiar with, seeing popular historical figures and civilizations portrayed in the game will certainly grab interest from players. DomiNations is now available as a free download on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android mobile devices.

 

“We’ve built DomiNations from the ground up to combine the in-depth strategy gameplay we’ve been creating for over 20 years with a fast, fun, and tactical experience customized for mobile devices,” said Brian Reynolds, Creative Director for DomiNations.

DomiNations is a base-building strategy game where players will choose to lead one of the world’s greatest nations including the British, Romans, Chinese, Germans, French, Japanese, and Greeks. The timeline of DomiNations unfolds across the expanse of human history, where players must research landmark technological developments, leverage unique strategic civilization abilities, and build Wonders of the World in order to pave their way to victory. With famous generals like Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, and Napoleon at the helm, players can relive history’s most famous conflicts at the tips of their fingers.

“Big Huge Games is ushering in the next generation of mobile strategy games with DomiNations, offering players an unrivaled amount of strategic choices and gameplay depth,” said John Robinson, general manager of Nexon M, Nexon’s arm devoted to mobile games.

The [a]listdaily spoke with Big Huge Games co-founder Tim Train about DomiNations, which he call a “Combat City Builder” or CCB. Some people, he said, call it “reverse tower defense” but that’s not as catchy.

Mobile is different from PC, both in the technical aspects of the platform but also in how players tend to play games. You’ve had to take that into account with your design, haven’t you?

Yep. One of the keys to mobile game design is making your game work for short gameplay sessions or long gameplay sessions. You want to have a lot more flexibility in how the player is able to play the game, so you need to have really short play session times that are possible. You can just log on and harvest your caravans and your farm and hunt the animals that are wandering around your map and see what rare resources you get from them. That might take a minute or two minutes, but when the player has a half hour of time that’s when you want to battle.

So when you have a long period of time you want to make more careful strategic decisions.

Absolutely. The attacks themselves, we wanted to add a lot more depth than the state of the art in strategy games these days.

How does monetizing the game work? Can I spend money to speed up construction?

Yes, you can spend your money on speedups and resources, those are the two main areas you’d spend premium currency on.

Does the game work equally well on tablets and smartphones?

We think it translates pretty well. That’s for people who own small-screen devices to decide. The trickiest bit is the interface, as in making sure your interface is readable, your icons are big enough to tap on but not too big that they obscure too much of the screen. So far we haven’t had any real issues with it.

What’s the marketing strategy for DomiNations? How will you help your audience find the game?

For us, as a game developer, our plan is just to make a good game. That may be a little naive to say in this day and age, but for us that;’s where it starts. If you make a great game that people want to come to play, they’re going to tell their friends. And then their friends are going to tell their other friends. To us that’s really the heart of it — you make a great game and people will come.

Now, there’s the whole user acquisition component to it in the mobile space, with optimization of channels. That’s not really our thing, that’s something for publishers. That’s where Nexon comes in.

How is developing this mobile game different from what you’ve experienced before creating PC games?

The thing that I’m excited about is the ability to actually understand more about what players actually like, and then responding to that. In the old days you’d basically box something up and throw it over the wall and that was it. You might have community forums or something, but you never really knew exactly how many people finished your game, or how many people bought it and never opened it. But in this world, you can say ‘OK, let’s actually look at what people are doing.’ Do they seem to like generals Are they building a lot of generals OK, maybe we’ll put some more generals in the game. That’s the thing to me about the ongoing development process, to be able to understand what your players like and do more of it.

Download DomiNations for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on the App Store and for Android devices on Google Play {links no longer active}.