THE EMPIRE BUILDER BUILDERS
Tobias Nowak asks Kai Ortmann, expert game designer at InnoGames, about working at the company in the mobile strategy game space for over a decade
Kai Ortmann, InnoGames
Successfully continuing a game series for more than ten years, especially in the mobile space, is very rare. Can you briefly outline the journey from Forge of Empires to Rise of Cultures and finally Heroes of History? We internally refer to them as FoE, RoC and HoH, and they are not sequels to one another in the traditional sense. We treat them more as spiritual successors. They are all unique and differ quite a bit from one another, but they still share a lot of DNA. All of them are historic city-building games in which you guide your city through the ages of humanity, from the Stone Age to the future. While some mechanics are similar in all three games, each one has a unique twist. For example, the heroes and RPG elements found in HoH are absent from the other two games. I started my professional career as a Junior
Designer on Forge of Empires in early 2014. Back then, it was still a pure browser game, but the mobile clients, which are 100% compatible with your browser account, were already in late development. I worked on many different elements of the game
and learned a lot during this time. It was a great learning environment because the game itself was
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still evolving, so there were plenty of opportunities to still contribute something unique. I worked on major Alliance features such as the guild expedition, as well as seasonal events and new reward systems. In late 2017, I was asked if I wanted to lead the
design of a new game. It was supposed to be a spiritual successor to FoE, but this time with a mobile-first approach. This game turned out to be Rise of Cultures, which I helped design and maintain until 2023. We really liked what we had built with RoC, so did a loyal player base, and we saw it as the foundation for yet another game. For this we simplified some of the gameplay loops in the city to make space for entirely new ones: collectible Heroes and RPG elements. We named the game Heroes of History, and I’m still working on it. We recently celebrated its first anniversary, and it’s a lot of fun working on this project.
What design principles did the games follow? How have these principles shifted? FoE started out as a browser game. Back then, browser games were designed to have quite long timers and very short sessions. Something you could keep open secretly in a browser tab while at work, occasionally
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