Rapture World Conquest – Press Release

 

 “Unlike other strategy games it gets your mind racing, reacting to what’s happening, and before you realise it’s all over and you’re raring to go again.” – Pocket Gamer

September 15th 2014 – Oxford, UK – Tundra Games Ltd. has announced the release of its very first title “Rapture – World Conquest”. Now available on iTunes for iPad and iPhone.

The game is a real time strategy conceived as a lightning fast version of Civilization with equal dashes of Risk and Populous. It’s a god game, where you play a jealous god, intent on wiping out enemy civilizations with devastating miracles and carrying your followers to the heavens. Should you risk all on military engagements? On science and technical achievements? Or improve farming to boost productivity? Or perhaps your followers should spend their time praising you, giving you the power to unleash more miracles.

Destroy the minions of your rivals and conquer the world before the End of Times.

Our trailer can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZAEmztaUqs and also via our website – www.tundragames.com. The game is now available on the app store here https://itunes.apple.com/app/rapture-world-conquest/id912227668?mt=8  We have promo codes available to journalists, please email dan.c@tundragames.com. We’re a friendly studio, please feel free to get in touch or chat on Twitter.

About Tundra

Tundra Games is a independent studio based in Oxford UK, made up of industry veterans Andrew Weinkove and Dan Collier. Andy and Dan having worked on many AAA titles including Skate It, Sims 3, FIFA, Madden, Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds Go and Need for Speed, and companies such as EA and Roxio. Their detailed bios can be found on the website and in the press kit.

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Press Contact

 

The Rapture of the Apple App Store!

We’ve arrived! Rapture is now available across the globe. Here’s the link:

Eat Hot Rapture, Apple

We’re finally at Apple! Yay! Hopefully Apple will like it and it won’t take too long to be approved; they say 5-10 days.

It’s a strange feeling sending off our little game into the big world. It’s been 3 years in development (on and off) and has been through dozens of iterations in the process. It’s going to be crazy seeing the game being played by other people and seeing how they react.

We also have the updated version of our trailer video for your enjoyment, updated with the new graphics and spacescapes:

What do you think? – feedback@tundragames.com

Hoping Rapture will be out mid September, watch this space.

Summer coding

Been lots of scurrying at Tundra in the last few weeks. Plenty of beta testing happening from our lovely Beta testers – (thanks to all of you, hope you’re enjoying the game). We’ve been fixing a few (minor) bugs and tweaking the game here and there. We’re going to be sending out a new beta build very soon, so if anyone else fancies getting an early play of the game and sending us your thoughts then please get in touch at info@tundragames.com and we’ll get you hooked up.

Rapture is due for release at the end of the month (August), feels like we’re on target, though we still have Apple submission to go through. Fun times ahead!

Here’s a sneak peek of our main menu. (The background moves behind the main titles.)

Beta Testers – A Call to Arms!

Lots of frenetic activity in the Tundra Towers these past few weeks.

We’ve been away to the Develop conference catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Had a great time, drank too much and played some awesome games. (Nidhogg is fantastic) Also finally got a chance to play Mario Kart 8 multiplayer – back to uni days screaming insults at one another.

Rapture is having the final polish put to it – lots of tweaking and tuning. We’re going to be Beta testing in the next few weeks and we’re looking for about 10 of you lovely people to have a go and let us know what you think. Anyone is welcome from beginners to gaming veterans. All we ask is you play the game and give us some honest feedback.

If you fancy playing and you have an iPhone or iPad then message us on Facebook, Twitter or email info@tundragames.com. We’ll send you an invite and get you signed up.

If you haven’t already seen them on Facebook or Twitter here’s some new artwork for the game.

This will be used as a parallax background for the main menu:

Dead landscape – used in the main menu

Our new app icon. Hopefully stand out nicely in the app store:

Our main game logo, which will also feature on the main menu and on the loading screen:

The Long Slog to Beta

Been a very busy couple of weeks here at Tundra. Rapture is really getting close to Beta and playing well. Here’s a few of the areas that have been worked on.

Tutorial
We now have a complete tutorial in place that will hopefully make the game easier for people to understand. The initial version of the tutorial was quite in-depth. It’s been a difficult balance to keep the tutorial friendly enough so as not to put off new players and at the same time provide enough detail to allow players to appreciate the depth of the game. In the end we decided to strip back a little, make sure the basics are shown first. We’ve then added a tips system at load, so players can get useful, but not essential, help each time they go into the game.

Play Testing
We’ve had a couple of people trying out the game and got some great feedback; mostly to do with understanding how the game plays. We’re hoping the tutorial will help with that. We’re also rearranging some of the in game HUD to make it easier to understand what everything does and also make it a little more polished.

SpaceScapes
We’ve spend some time improving the various unlockable SpaceScapes. There’s 28 scapes to unlock – there’s a good variety with some fun novelty ones thrown in.

Difficulty and Game options
The game was getting much too easy, especially for Tundra peeps who have obviously been playing for a while now. The AI has been substantially beefed up and will now jump on you if you leave regions unprotected. And there are also customisation options available going into game.

We’re hoping this will be the last round of changes required before we’re at Beta. At which point we hope to get more people testing the game and giving us feedback. This will focus mostly on the AI and controls, which might have some further tweaking

If you haven’t seen it yet please take a look at our preview trailer!

Rapture Game Trailer

Rapture – World Conquest Official Trailer

We can finally reveal our official trailer for Rapture – World Conquest. Let us know what you think, please comment, like and share.

Gameplay Video! Finally!

Rapture – World Conquest

Here’s the long promised gameplay video for Rapture – World Conquest. Hopefully it shows off a bit of what the game is all about.

I do manage to win fairly easily in this run through, but bear in mind that it took me a dozen plays before I destroyed the computer 🙂

Please let us know what you think, we appreciate feedback.

A Civilization/Counter-Strike Cocktail?

Here’s a bit of detail about how the idea of the game came about. The concept of the game was originally conceived between sessions of Counter-Strike and Civilization, two very addictive, but very different games. Could a game combine the high-stakes, short-round-times of Counter-Strike into a world conquering game like Civilization? Could Civ be sped up and pushed into a quick throwaway 5 minute round?

Games of Civilization can take many hours to complete, and whilst this is part of the game’s appeal and charm, it can drain time and put a strain on relationships with loved ones. We wanted to create a game with the essence of Civilization, but boiled down for quick 5 minute blasts of gameplay, especially appealing on mobile while you’re out and about. In the same way you can jump in and play a quick game of Counter-Strike. As well as the length of games there’s also the endless clicking and micro-management in Civ, which while fun on PC, doesn’t always work as well for fast, intense games. We wanted a more fluid, strategic game, which focuses on the bigger picture.

We started off by implementing many of the features found in the original game (at least in a simplified form) on a smaller globe. With settlers and units running around, founding cities and attacking enemies. From the start we wanted the gameplay to be in realtime, rather than turn based, to push along play, and most resource management is automated, so the player doesn’t have to micromanage.

Initially the game was difficult to play, with too much to monitor at any one time and still far too long. Elements were then stripped out and simplified. Eventually we arrived at a good balance between the detail of the original and the quick play we were hoping for. For a while attacks were between individual cities, and regions shifted around these cities, but this was found to be awkward and confusing, so the idea of static regions was added. The gameplay naturally became more arcade, but we have attempted to balance this against keeping the strategic feel. In fact a lot of the original elements are still in play behind the scenes – Settling, Terrain bonuses, Detailed attack calculation etc.

Miracles were added later as a way of directly intervening in the affairs of the planet and preventing Civilizations dominating too quickly. They are inspired by the miracles in another classic – Populous. At a similar time, the game became more themed on the idea of vengeful gods and rapture.

We’re hoping to get a beta version out in the next few months, so we can get some feedback on whether you feel we’ve got the balance right. If anyone that would like to get involved with the beta and give us feedback, please keep an eye on our facebook and twitter pages for upcoming details.

Counter-Strike by Valve
Civilization by Sid Meier
Populous by Bullfrog

Rapture Game Play

We thought we’d give you an overview of how the gameplay works in Rapture – World Conquest. Please note the graphics are a work in progress. Let us know if you have any thoughts, ideas or comments. Thanks

Overview

The game focuses on you as a god battling other gods indirectly for souls and land on a fertile planet. Your ultimate aim is to take over all regions of the planet and wipe out your enemies.

Starting screen

At the start you have the choice of your starting region; taking into account its strategic position and its production value. High production regions will be quicker to increase their armies. You can choose a small island and enemies will not be able to reach you until their technology is sufficient, but you may limit the space you can spread into.

Initial Starting Positions

Armies and battles

Once settled, your armies will start to increase and allow you to direct units to attack neighbouring regions. Initially a lot of the game regions will be neutral and simple to conquer. But as civs run out of space, they will increasingly attack each other. Attacking is a case of tapping a region and tapping where you wish to attack. Armies will be sent out to the selected region and battle will ensue! If you are able to reduce the defending armies to zero that region becomes part of your civilization and will start producing friendly armies.

Taking over regions with your armies

Your scientists are constantly at work to produce bigger and better technology. As you progress through each technological age your armies become increasingly more powerful.

Miracles

Miracle Being Dropped

Across the bottom of the screen is the mana bar. Mana allows you to unleash miracles on the planet, the more mana you have, the more miracles available. More destructive miracles require more mana. As the bar fills the miracle icons will become available to drag onto the planet. The bar fills faster the more followers you have praising you. Most miracles are destructive natural events – such as earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanoes. The meteor strike is the most destructive and will wipe out most armies in its impact zone. Other miracles will affect regions through cowardice, disease and famine.

Production

The right bar is the production balance options. You have the choice of directing production to one of four options – religion to boost your mana creation, military to concentrate on army strength, science to advance quicker in technology or food to increase the number of armies being produced. With nothing selected production will be balanced across all four.

The left bar gives further game options – power-ups to boost your powers, as well as a button to balance your armies across all regions and another to choose how many units you want to deploy each time you attack. Finally the top bar provides game information to see how you are progressing in your world conquest.

End game

Your game progresses as you battle for regions; directing your armies and raining down miracles. Your armies may be overwhelmed in which case your remaining followers will be vanquished to hell. If you overcome your enemies and dominate the globe you can then rapture your followers up to your heavenly realm in beams of warm light blue.

Armies Raptured