Upcoming Games

MWSF 2010: Hands on with Ngmoco’s ‘We Rule’ City Building Game

The final game that I previewed at Ngmoco while in San Francisco was an upcoming social game We Rule developed by Newtoy. Like Touch Pets Dogs, We Rule is an online only game so requires a persistent network connection in order to play. In exchange, Ngmoco has created a more interactive social game that you can play with your friends.

The game map shows you your kingdom as well as the kingdom of your Plus+ contacts. Scrolling across the map shows you the relative size of everyone’s kingdoms. The goal of the game is to build up your community as much as possible, but with the added twist that your own kingdom can be customized with a number of special cosmetic tweaks. These tweaks will make your kingdom truly unique and personalized.

The game consists of alternating between your daily activities of harvesting or otherwise managing your resources while building up new houses, farms, and businesses. Your kingdom will be bustling with activity from townspeople as it grows, though unlike God Finger, you don’t actually have individual control of the inhabitants.

The game progresses as you earn more money from performing daily tasks such as harvesting crops and managing your businesses. Each crop will generate a certain amount of gold, but each variety of crop takes a different amount of time to grow. Once fully grown, you have a certain amount of time to harvest the crop (tapping on it) before it goes bad. Performing these daily tasks regularly provides you with a steady income in order to buy further buildings and even decorative touches to your kingdom. This includes waterways, different styles of fences, and much more.

Aside from gold, you earn experience points throughout the game which builds up a supply of “mojo". Mojo can then be used to accelerate processes in the game, such as crop growth. This allows you to earn gold faster, and progress further in the game. Of course, mojo can also be purchased directly, if you want to earn your items faster.

One neat aspect of the game is the integrated social network. You can see your friend’s kingdoms and even visit them. Once in another kingdom you may patronize a business which works similarly to crop harvesting. You initiate an action, such as ordering an item which may take some time to build. Your friend must then take their own action to fulfill the order and back and forth. The end result is an earning of gold for both parties, but only after mutual participation.

Ngmoco has released this podcast which walks through the game. Like Ngmoco’s other games, We Rule is also nearing completion over the next few weeks and will be free to download.

We Rule was developed by Newtoy, the developer of Words with Friends and Chess with Friends and will be published by Ngmoco.