rymdkapsel

rymdkapsel is an abstract real-time strategy game about construction and resource management. Set in space, the main goals are to survive enemy waves as long as possible, research all monoliths, and research them within a time limit.

It starts by providing two minions and a small amount of the three resources: particle material (pink), engineered material (blue) and food (yellow). It is possible to build in any direction, but this can only be done after creating corridor paths (brown). There are seven types of buildings available right away each with their own resource requirements. Next to corridors there are pink extractors that need to be built next to a pink particle field. There are only a limited amount of particle fields available in the environment, so this resource needs to be managed carefully. Next there is a light blue reactor to generate engineered material, a green garden to grow sludge, a yellow kitchen to convert the sludge into food, a blue weapons base where the defensive weapons are stored, and an orange quarters to grow new minions. The game contains some elements from the Tetris puzzle game. The shape of the buildings cannot be determined, but takes on the form of one of the Tetris block shapes. The shape for the next building, along with the queue, is shown in the top left corner. That way buildings need to be arranged to fit the environment according to the provided shape. It is also possible to rotate the shape before starting construction.

The minions act on their own and cannot be controlled directly. At the bottom of the screen four order types are available: engineering (speed up work in the reactor), food service (turn sludge into food and train minions in the quarters), construction (work on constructing any building) and defense (return to a blue weapons base to get a gun and defend against attacks). In that part of the screen minions are shown as white vertical lines and they can be dragged to any of the order types to get them to work. It is also possible to leave them idle. Minions then choose on their own where to work on that order and cannot be ordered to a specific part of the screen when multiple options are available for their order type.

A red bar fills at the bottom of the screen and when it is full there is an alien attack. The minions need to be ordered to a weapons base to defend, as they have no weapons outside of it. When killed, additional minions can be grown in the quarters. Each quarter only offers two additional minions and each weapons base has only two guns, so multiple ones have to be constructed to grow in size and defense. With each wave the time for the next one becomes shorter and the enemies grow in size. It is possible to cancel constructed buildings to return 75% of the value, for instance an extractor once the field has been depleted.

On the far sides of the fields are monoliths left behind by a previous race that offer advantages. The player needs to access them by linking them to the base through corridors. Once connected, an additional research order becomes available. Each monolith has a specific bonus that can be researched, such as faster movement, more efficient extractors, slower enemies, increased weapons range etc.

The PC version contains two additional game modes with four new monoliths and more missions. One of the new game modes is the Zen mode where the alien attacks are removed for a meditative building experience.