iOS and Android augmented reality strategy game Domination Earth operates in the real world around you – military style! Check in wherever you go using your phone or tablet to capture places and pieces of land, expanding your very own global empire – like Geocaching on Steroids!
Invented and developed by startup Epic Dragon UK, the concept for the game was originally inspired by the “Swarm” social network (formerly “Foursquare”), which some of CEO Dan Dragon’s friends and relatives were simply hooked on and kept checking in wherever they went together. He could never understand the incentive behind just recording all the places you’ve visited, so he decided to take it to a whole new level and transform the process of ‘checking in’ into a full-blown war game! It creates a personalized “Travel Log”, but also suggests places you would never normally visit, in order to collect valuable resources.
A health conscious and adventure provoking platform, it encourages hiking, cycling and other forms of travel and real-world exploration in order to collect resources – you have to physically approach each item wherever it appears in the world in order to pick it up.
Game tactics include capturing lands to build military bases, collecting construction resources and recruiting armies to establish regional dominance. To defend your territory, initiate alliances with neighbors to fight against foreign threats or build a missile launcher in your backyard to thwart invaders of your hometown. It is vital for you to check in five times at any location in order to establish a new base of operations. Once you’ve collected enough resources you can send your armies to the overseas base in order to advance your influence remotely, even after you’ve left!
Domination Earth also engages in “Item Scrapping”: any real-world item with a barcode can be transformed into a resource by using your camera (don’t worry, you still get to keep your items afterward!). Books, toys, DVDs – almost anything becomes a source of crafting materials.
Some amusing moments of feedback have been reported to us via our forum along the way! Despite all the app descriptions and in-game tutorials, many people still don’t realize what a “GPS-Based Game” means and that it is connected to the real world – including questions like “How do I walk?” and “The game says move 100 meters away from the base, but what does that mean? How do I move?!”. We’ve also had to introduce a limit on “Item Scrapping” in the early stages, as some people would spend an entire day in a shopping mall up to a point where other shoppers thought they were store employees going around and scanning wares!!
Epic Dragon has been developing games since April 2013, but until this year mainly focused on desktop and browser-based MMO games (most notably – Flamefrost). Our desktop games are developed using a JavaScript-based engine which we created ourselves, supported by a cloud platform written in Python 3.
In July 2017 we adapted Ionic 3 (the hybrid web app development framework – Ionic) and built our first mobile game – “Domination: Earth” – using this framework and, once again, an in-house built platform written in Python (with Django framework) for the server-side software.
Epic Dragon LTD is based in Norfolk, UK, however, we love the fact that in this day and age it is possible to work with talented individuals all over the world. Our game servers “float in the cloud” somewhere around Ohio, US.
The “unchanging core” of the team is CEO Dan Dragon and Head of Development/Content and Chief Visionary Officer Irene Stetsiuke. The Domination Earth game assets were produced by a remote team of freelancers and contractors outside the UK: a music and sound effect composer from Germany, a content developer from Latvia, a 2D artist from the US and a 3D designer and animators from Russia.
You can follow the news and development in the realm of Domination Earth via the Forum on Facebook and on Twitter.
Domination Earth is available on both iOS and Android.
Check it out at one of the links below!
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This article was Published by Edamame Reviews, Written by Epic Dragon
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