DAILY CHALLENGE
KAZAN (DEMO)
Strategy · Real time · Demo · Extra game
Build your city, raise an army and outrun the lava.
WHAT IT IS
An island with a volcano. You start with your base and four workers already chopping wood and mining iron; with that you raise houses, farms, barracks, towers and walls, and train soldiers, snipers, tanks, scouts and drones. Workers repair too. A quarter of the way into the match (20 to 60 minutes) the volcano erupts and the lava eats the island tile by tile until almost nothing is left: you have to explore, fight and, when the time comes, run; your people walk around the lava on their own while there is a way. If enemies destroy your base, you lose; if the lava swallows it, you carry on with whoever is left. When time runs out, the highest score wins.
It is built for the phone: tap a figure and its group is selected, hold still and drag to select an area, and buildings are picked from a strip with their picture (greyed out when you cannot afford them) and placed by dragging a ghost over a grid that shows where you can. With a mouse there is more: the right button gives orders, a single click places the building and whatever can be clicked lights up on hover; but nothing lives only in the mouse. Four kinds of island: forest, snow, desert and swamp. Chip sound, no music.
IT IS A DEMO
Today you play against the computer (one to nine rivals; the island grows with the match, from 96 to 128 tiles, and every nation starts as far from the others as possible). Online play, 2 to 10 nations on the same map all at the same time, already exists in the code (every phone simulates the same match and only the orders travel), but it needs a server that is not switched on yet: the button says «soon». The Android app, with ads like War Zone's, comes later.
WHERE IT COMES FROM
From the real-time strategy games of the nineties, StarCraft and Age of Empires: workers who gather and build, units that counter each other, fog of war and a shared map where whoever explores finds the other. From city-building games like CityVille, the build timers. And from round-based games, the reset: there is no eternal world here, just an island that comes to an end.
It comes from the same house as Daily Challenge and shares its look: a 320x180 screen, a 3x5 font, a 128-colour palette and synthesized chip sound, without a single audio file. Here it is free and ad-free. The name (火山, «volcano» in Japanese) is provisional.
PLAY · GAMES · PAST DAYS · HOW TO PLAY · ABOUT · CONTACT · PRIVACY · TERMS