A native, open-source C++ port of Rule the Kingdom, rebuilt function by function from the original Android game library, so the kingdom can be ruled again on a modern computer.
This is the port itself, running natively: Chapter 1, "The Story Begins". Not a mock-up, not the original app.
Left: the official 2012 trailer (Game Insight / innoWate). Right: the port, running natively on a Mac.
README last updated 2026-10-27 (version 1.2).
- Where things stand
- What is ported, and what is not
- Play it · Controls
- Found a bug?
- The game that was · History · How it played · The people · Gallery
- Why a port · Scope and rules
- Progress
- Building · Layout · Sources · Licence and credits
The port is complete (version 1.0, 27 October 2026). Every game function of the original 5.11 release is ported: the opening tutorial, the city, workers and farms, quests, campaign maps, boss fights, spells, crafting, chests, the shops, the daily bonus, the arena and offline PvP, saves, sound, music and particle effects, from a new game to the end of the campaign.
The project is finished. From here on it only gets minor bug fixes, as they turn up in play.
| Phase | State |
|---|---|
| 1. Port the code | ✅ every game function of 5.11; what is left out is online-only, dead in 5.11, or platform code SDL3 replaces |
| 2. Make it playable | ✅ new game to campaign finish, with every system working |
| 3. Bug hunt | ✅ play-tested; bugs are fixed from the original as they turn up |
| 4. Polish and release | ✅ downloads for macOS (DMG), Windows and Linux; Retina, fullscreen, a frame-rate cap, desktop notifications |
All of the game is ported, function by function, each tagged with its original address (// @0x...).
| Area | State |
|---|---|
| Map rendering, GUI, input, dialogs | ✅ done |
| City economy: buildings, workers, farms, taxes, shop | ✅ done |
| Hero, army, quests, items, the opening tutorial | ✅ done |
| Campaign maps, world map, campaign combat, boss fights | ✅ done |
| Spells, rage and mana, buffs | ✅ done |
| Hiring and healing troops, repairs, raids | ✅ done |
| Character info, sets, collections, professions | ✅ done |
| Crafting, chests and keys, the item shop | ✅ done |
| Daily bonus, tavern, calendar events | ✅ done |
| The arena, and PvP against generated rivals | ✅ done (offline stand-in for the server) |
| Sound, music, particles, screen effects | ✅ done |
| Screenshot mode | ✅ done (saves a PNG to ~/Pictures/Rule the Kingdom) |
| Desktop: Retina, fullscreen, frame-rate cap, notifications, saves | ✅ done |
The exceptions (on purpose):
| Exception | Why |
|---|---|
| Real-money purchases | Removed. Crystals are earned in play. |
| Facebook, friends, gifts, the social tabs | Need the publisher's servers, which are gone. Kept dormant in the code. |
| Server saves, live events and live PvP | Replaced by local saves, the calendar and generated rivals. |
| Admin / editor / debug console | Not reachable in the shipping game, so deliberately not ported. |
All you need is the original game's Android file, the Rule the Kingdom 5.11 APK. Put it in
the same folder as the game (any file name ending in .apk); nothing has to be unpacked. The
game's two update packs, which can no longer be downloaded anywhere, come with the game. If the
APK isn't beside the game, the game asks you to pick it the first time and remembers it.
Downloads are on the releases page:
| System | Download | How |
|---|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Rule-the-Kingdom-<version>-macOS-AppleSilicon.dmg |
Open it and drag the game to Applications; put the APK in Applications too (or pick it on the first start). The app is signed ad hoc, not with an Apple developer certificate: the first time, open it with right-click → Open (or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway). |
| Windows (64-bit) | Rule-the-Kingdom-<version>-Windows-x86_64.zip |
Unzip it, put the APK in the folder, run rtk.exe. |
| Linux (x86-64) | Rule-the-Kingdom-<version>-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz |
Unpack it, put the APK in the folder, run ./rtk. |
Saves go in ~/Library/Application Support/Rule the Kingdom/ (macOS), %APPDATA%\Rule the Kingdom
(Windows) or ~/.local/share/Rule the Kingdom (Linux); --storage <folder> keeps them somewhere
else. Or build it yourself (see Building).
The mouse (or trackpad) does what a finger did on the phone: click to tap, drag to scroll, the wheel or a pinch to zoom.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Esc | Back (closes the top window, as Android's Back button did) |
| F10 | Frame-rate cap: 30 / 60 / the display's rate |
| F11 (or Cmd+Enter, Cmd+Ctrl+F, Alt+Enter) | Fullscreen on / off |
Both are also buttons in the game's Settings (the gear): "Fullscreen" and "FPS". On a Mac
keyboard F10 / F11 are media keys unless fn is held, so the buttons are the easy way there.
Please open an issue with:
- What you did (the quest, the map, the window).
- What you expected, and what happened instead.
- A screenshot, and the end of the log if it crashed.
Rule the Kingdom (Russian: Империя героев, "Empire of Heroes", as the Russian gameplay video in this archive is titled) is a free-to-play hybrid of role-playing, city-building and farming, published by Game Insight and developed by its studio innoWate. Its official site described it as "an unprecedented blend of RPG action, city-building, farming and storytelling!"
You play a ruler who has come home to a half-ruined realm. You build houses and workshops for your subjects, farm and gather resources, then lead a hero and a squad of hired warriors across a campaign of isometric maps: forests, deserts, snowy mountains and an imperial capital. You fight monsters and bosses, cast spells, collect and enchant gear, and send your hero into a PvP arena.
Official store screenshots (Windows Store listing): a walled kingdom, the frozen frontier, and the Oil Farm.
| Publisher | Game Insight (listed as "Game Insight Global" on the Windows Phone Store) |
| Developer | innoWate, a studio within Game Insight |
| Genre | RPG / city-builder / farming hybrid, isometric, tap-to-move |
| Original release | Android (Google Play): April 2012. iOS: June 2012 |
| Other platforms | Amazon Appstore (July 2012), Facebook (May 2013), Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 (2013) |
| Launch claims | More than 1,000 quests across 12 campaigns, boss monsters, three schools of magic, magical gems for crafting rare weapon and armor sets |
| Model | Free-to-play with two currencies: gold (earned) and crystals (earned slowly or bought), timers you could skip |
| Final Android version | 5.11 (October 2014), the code base this port is built from |
Every dated claim below carries its source in Sources and accuracy notes. Where a date could not be verified it says so instead of guessing.
- 2009. Game Insight is founded in Moscow. (Wikipedia gives 2009; a 2012 interview dates it to December 2009, when it started as a holding company.) It builds a business of publishing free-to-play games for Facebook and then mobile, with a network of partner studios.
- 2009. innoWate, a European social-game studio (LinkedIn lists Riga, Latvia, and a 2009 founding), is working on social games. Its My Country, a nation-building Facebook game, later reached over 10 million players according to Game Insight's own 2012 press release, and became its first Game Insight title.
- October 2010. Game Insight releases Mystery Manor, billed as the first hidden-object game on Facebook.
- 2010 to 2011. Paradise Island (first called Resort World on Facebook) arrives on Android in January 2011 and tops Google Play's grossing charts. Airport City follows in May 2011.
- 2011. Game Insight's catalogue reaches about 50 million monthly active users and about $50 million in revenue for the year (VentureBeat's 2012 profile).
- March 2012. The Tribez launches.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 27 April 2012 | Game Insight announces Rule the Kingdom "now available on Android platforms" (Google Play) in a San Francisco-dated press release. It describes a crossover of RPG and city-builder, with over 1,000 quests, 12 campaigns and three schools of magic. Chief Producer Leonid Sirotin calls it "the first, of what we plan to be many, crossover mobile titles appealing to casual and core gamers." |
| June 2012 | iOS launch. The iPad edition (Rule the Kingdom HD) was free from day one and the iPhone version was scheduled for 28 June (Joystiq/AOL, 27 June 2012). |
| July 2012 | Amazon Appstore release (per Wikipedia's Game Insight article). |
| 2012 (Android builds) | Version 2.07 (the early Android build included in this archive) uses the original engine with data in .jet containers. |
| May 2013 | Facebook canvas version (per Wikipedia). The archive holds many screenshots from it. |
| 2013 | Windows Phone 7.5/8 and Windows 8 versions. The Windows Phone .xap in this archive is v1.4.0.5. Ewan Spence reviews version 1.4.0.14 for All About Windows Phone on 17 October 2013 and scores it 76%. |
| December 2013 | The newest Windows 8 build in the archive, 5.0.0.39, with the latest content. |
| 19 February 2014 | The official site rulekingdom.com is captured (the archived copy is in this folder). It advertises Android, iPhone, iPad, Facebook, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. |
| October 2014 | Last Android release in the archive: 5.11, the code base of this port. |
| Later | The publisher's servers behind saves, events, friends, PvP and purchases (the game's own domains were rtk-*.susiworld.com) stopped working, and the game could no longer be played as designed. The exact shutdown dates could not be verified, so none are claimed here. |
| 2026 | This project begins on 2026-10-04. |
- 2012. Game Insight opens a San Francisco office. Its 2012 plan: 26 games in the year, and revenue of over $150 million, triple 2011's.
- April 2014. The San Francisco office (eight people) is closed.
- 29 May 2014. Headquarters moves to Vilnius, Lithuania.
- May 2017. Guns of Boom, a multiplayer shooter, launches.
- 14 June 2022. Game Insight announces the closure of a Russian legal entity and suspends employees' access at those offices.
- Wikipedia's description today: a developer and publisher of more than 45 free-to-play mobile and social games, localized in 10 languages and played in 218 countries.
End card of the official trailer: "innoWate" and "Game Insight" present Rule the Kingdom.
A linear, episodic campaign of maps joined by a world map: your battered home kingdom, the emperor's capital, an arena, and villages in trouble. As you level up, the fog lifts on new regions (the reviews and archived screenshots show green forests, deserts and the snowy north). Quests arrive as speech bubbles from villagers, refugees and envoys; the opening has you meet old Stoutbeard and restore your kingdom. Heroes can be male or female, and the game's art shows both a male and a female lead.
The world map (left, a screen recording) and the "Select a path" screen: Kingdom, Arena and PvP (right).
Place houses, farms, workshops and decorations; gather wood and stone; keep your helpers busy; collect taxes; grow crops (the Oil Farm shown above grows sunflowers); craft food, weapons and armor. Everything runs on real-time timers, which is where the crystal currency came in.
Your hero and the soldiers you hire (pikemen, archers, mages and more) march into hostile maps. Standard fights resolve as automated turns; boss fights let you choose a stance each turn. A fury meter charges as you trade blows, and spells and elixirs spend it. Equipment, orbs and enchanting with gems shape your power; the inventory and shop show it.
The Skeleton Knight boss, the victory screen, and the defeat screen, where the hero is healed with time or crystals.
Inventory, shop, and a "Battle of the Kings" ambush against another player's hero.
All About Windows Phone, 17 October 2013 (Ewan Spence, 76%). The game offers very long-term play, but timers and freemium design are what stretch it out; without them the reviewer estimates the quests could be finished in about nine days. Praised as one of the better RPGs on Windows Phone; criticised for a story that is too on-rails.
Only facts that sources support are listed. Rule the Kingdom's own game files and store pages credit companies, not individual developers, so no designer, programmer or artist is named here. Guessing names would not be accurate.
- Founded 2009 in Moscow; headquarters moved to Vilnius, Lithuania on 29 May 2014.
- In 2012, VentureBeat described a leadership team of women, led by founder and CEO Alisa Chumachenko, who had worked in the games business since 2000 and previously headed marketing and advertising at Astrum Online Entertainment until its 2009 merger into Mail.Ru Group. Others named: Darya Trushkina (VP business development, leading the San Francisco expansion), Olga Skvortsova (COO), Alexandra Pestretsova (VP marketing) and Leonid Sirotin (VP production; quoted in Rule the Kingdom's launch release as Chief Producer).
- It worked by owning 51% to 75% of about 15 partner studios (300+ developers) in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, publishing their games on Facebook, Android and iOS.
- Well-known titles: Mystery Manor (2010), Paradise Island (2010 on Facebook; top-grossing on Google Play for more than 26 consecutive weeks on Android), Airport City (2011), The Tribez (2012), Rule the Kingdom (2012), Guns of Boom (2017).
- A studio within Game Insight, called a "veteran studio" in the launch release. Its first Game Insight title was My Country (over 10 million players according to the publisher), a nation-building Facebook game Adweek described as the work of a European social-game developer.
- LinkedIn lists the company's headquarters in Riga, Latvia (founded 2009, 11 to 50 employees). That is a single, thinly sourced listing, so treat the location as likely rather than certain.
- Rule the Kingdom's own text credits "Game Insight, innoWate" and says the trademarks belong to their owners.
- Individual designers, programmers and artists of Rule the Kingdom: none credited in any source found.
- The exact date the servers went offline and the exact dates the game left each store.
- An old secondhand summary in this archive claims 2016 to 2018 shutdowns and "abandonware" status; it is labelled by its own author as AI-written and unreliable, so it is not used as a source here.
Official trailer, feature reel (Game Insight / innoWate, 2012)
 Reign over a prospering kingdom |
 Drive your foes from the frozen frontier |
 Farm the land to provide for your subjects |
 Unleash the fury of deadly spells |
 Make friends in high places |
 Fog of war, desktop/web version |
From the official website (rulekingdom.com, captured 19 February 2014)
Kingdom building, battle and magic, legendary treasures, eccentric characters: the site's own feature sections.
Like many free-to-play games of its era, Rule the Kingdom depended on its publisher's servers: saves, events, friends, PvP and purchases all went online. When those services stopped, the game could no longer be played as it was. No server data or content beyond version 5.11 survives, so this project brings back what the game files themselves contain, and makes it run on current hardware (including Apple Silicon Macs, which cannot execute the original 32-bit ARM Android build).
Screenshots of the port itself: the city, the shop and a requirements dialog.
RTKContinued is maintained solely by UncleAcid1. It began as nostalgia: afternoons spent playing this game with their mother, and the wish to give those hours back to anyone who remembers them. It has been a labour of love, and a personal investment, to bring it back to life.
Part of the pull is the look. The game's rendered, storybook artwork and gentle whimsy feel less like a phone game and more like the casual PC classics of the late 1990s and early 2000s: warm, handmade and unhurried. It is a time capsule of how casual gaming once felt, and it remains more intuitive than most of its kind, then or now.
The port was made possible with Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet 5.5, under constant human supervision, creativity, research and ingenuity. Every function is checked against the original, and nothing in the game's art or content is generated; all of it is the original work.
- A faithful port, not a remake. Every function is translated from the original's code and
tagged with its address (
// @0x...); its formats, formulas and even its quirks are kept. Every guess was checked against the original's code before the project closed. - Offline first. Everything that needed the server is rebuilt to run locally: seasonal events follow the calendar, crystals are earned in play (daily rewards, chests, quests) instead of bought, the arena and PvP run offline against generated rivals, and friends stay dormant. Online code is kept dormant so a community server could be added later. There are no real-money purchases.
- Platforms: macOS, Windows and Linux, with SDL3 and OpenGL.
- Saves stay in the original's format.
- Only the APK comes from the player. The 5.11 Android APK can still be found; the game reads
it as it is. The two update packs the game's server once sent (
main.27.kbf,patch.33.kbf) and the art only the Windows 8 build had are lost anywhere else, so they are kept ingamedata/and ship with the game.
| # | Milestone | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Map rendering | ✅ done |
| 2 | GUI, input, dialogs | ✅ done |
| 3 | City economy (buildings, workers, shop, farms, saves) | ✅ done |
| 4 | Hero, army, quests, items, decoration jobs, campaign maps, campaign combat, new-game tutorial | ✅ done |
| 5 | The rest of the game: spells, bosses, world map, hiring, crafting, chests, shops, tavern, events, arena, PvP | ✅ done |
| 6 | Sound and effects | ✅ done |
| 7 | Desktop release and polish | ✅ done |
| 🏰 | Version 1.0 (27 October 2026) | ✅ complete; minor bug fixes only from here on |
The full log of every step lives in STATUS.md, the changes per version in CHANGELOG.md, and the per-function map of the original in docs/port_inventory.md.
At the close, 2026-10-27: every game function of the original ported, in 23 days (the first
commit was on 4 October 2026); about 100,000 lines of C++, about 5,000 functions tagged with their
original address. What stays unported is online-only, dead in 5.11 (nothing reaches it), or platform
code that SDL3 replaces (python3 tools/inventory.py --steps).
Language and stack: C++17, SDL3, OpenGL, pugixml, libpng, libjpeg, zlib, libvorbis, FreeType.
Code base ported: Android 5.11 libkingdom.so (ARMv7, October 2014).
The starting kingdom drawn by this project's own renderer (left), and a schematic from its map-format decoder (right).
Requirements: CMake 3.20+, Apple's command line tools (xcode-select --install), and SDL3,
pugixml, libpng, libjpeg, libvorbis and libogg
(brew install cmake sdl3 pugixml libpng jpeg-turbo libvorbis libogg). FreeType 2.4.5 and
SDL_ttf 2.0.11 are bundled in third_party/.
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --target app
That leaves build/Rule the Kingdom.app (the Homebrew libraries and the update packs copied in,
signed ad hoc). The bare program runs too: ./build/rtk --storage <save folder> (it looks for the
APK beside it, or --root <folder with the APK>).
Windows and Linux are built by GitHub Actions on every push
(.github/workflows/build.yml): Linux on Ubuntu 22.04 with clang,
Windows with MSYS2 (CLANG64), both with SDL 3.4 built from source. The packages
(tools/package_linux.sh, tools/package_windows.sh) are the run's artifacts: the program, the
libraries it needs, the update packs in data/ and HOW_TO_PLAY.txt. To build on Linux yourself:
install CMake, clang, SDL 3.4, pugixml, libpng, libjpeg, libvorbis and the OpenGL headers, then the
same two cmake commands without --target app.
To share the game, make a disk image: a window with the game's icon, an arrow and the Applications folder over the original world map, ready to drag and install.
bash tools/make_dmg.sh
It installs what it needs with Homebrew the first time (and create-dmg), builds HEAD in a clean
worktree (local, uncommitted changes are left out), and leaves
dist/Rule-the-Kingdom-<version>-macOS-<chip>.dmg (the version comes from CHANGELOG.md; a build
after the release's commit adds the commit, 1.0+3f2a1b9). The first time, macOS asks whether
Terminal may control Finder: allow it, that's how the window is laid out. The background is
packaging/macos/dmg/background.png (+ @2x), drawn by tools/make_dmg_background.py; the icon is
packaging/macos/AppIcon.icns, made from the original Android icon by tools/make_app_icon.py.
src/the port (engine, game logic, GUI, HUD, windows)tools/Python/Ghidra tools for the original's formats and for reading the decompiledocs/working notesthird_party/bundled libraries
Code base: Android 5.11 libkingdom.so (ARMv7, Oct 2014, about 10.5k exported C++ symbols).
Primary data: the 5.11 APK assets/data. Secondary: the Win8 5.0.0.39 Appx and the .kbf expansion packs.
tools/rtk_extract.py: extracts the resource containers (Android.jet, Win8res_data.bin,.kbf).tools/ghidra_headless.sh: runs Ghidra headless with the Homebrew JDK 21.tools/ghidra_scripts/ExportDecomp.java: dumps decompiled C for every function.ghidra/: the Ghidra project (rtk511), which can be opened in the GUI withghidraRun.out/: generated output (assets,decomp.c,functions.tsv). It can be regenerated at any time.
python3 tools/rtk_extract.py android "../Android files/rule-the-kingdom-5-11-multi-android/assets/data" out/assets/android511
python3 tools/rtk_extract.py win8 ../_extract/win5/Assets out/assets/win8
python3 tools/rtk_extract.py kbf ../files/main.27.kbf out/assets/kbf_main27
tools/ghidra_headless.sh "$PWD/ghidra" rtk511 -import "../Android files/rule-the-kingdom-5-11-multi-android/lib/armeabi-v7a/libkingdom.so" \
-scriptPath "$PWD/tools/ghidra_scripts" -postScript ExportDecomp.java "$PWD/out"
Index entry: u32 name_len (includes the NUL), then the name, then 8 little-endian u32 fields:
hash, width, height, is_data, bpp, offset, size, chunk.
- Android: payload is in
data/<chunk>.jet.offsetis global, so subtract the smallest offset of any entry in that chunk. - Win8: payload is at
res_data.bin[offset:offset+size]. - KBF: header
u32 magic=0x75B4A351, u32 index_size, 3×u32, then the index, then data at20 + index_size + offset. - XML, xmlb, map
.binand TTF payloads are gzipped on Android (and some on Win8).
Facts about the game and companies were checked against these sources (accessed 2026-10-18):
- Game Insight press release, 27 April 2012: Rule the Kingdom now available on Android
- Wikipedia: Game Insight (also saved as a PDF in the archive)
- VentureBeat: With 4 women leading 300 men, Game Insight will triple revenues in 2012
- Joystiq/AOL, 27 June 2012: Rule the Kingdom comes to iOS (summarised from search results; the page itself no longer loads)
- All About Windows Phone, 17 October 2013: Review: Rule The Kingdom
- Adweek, on innoWate and My Country; LinkedIn and GamePressure for innoWate's location and publisher link
- Primary material in this archive: the 2014 capture of rulekingdom.com, the official trailer, the Android 2.07 and 5.11 packages, the Windows 8 and Windows Phone builds, and the game's own localized strings
Images and video frames on this page come from the archived official site, the official trailer, store listings and recordings of the original game, and screenshots of this port. All Rule the Kingdom artwork and trademarks belong to their respective owners (Game Insight and innoWate); they are shown here for documentation and preservation. This project is not affiliated with them.
The port's code (everything in src/, tools/ and packaging/) is released under the
MIT licence, © 2026 UncleAcid1. The bundled libraries in third_party/ keep their own
licences.
The game itself is not covered by it. Rule the Kingdom, its art, music, text, data and
trademarks belong to Game Insight (publisher) and innoWate (developer). Only the parts that
can no longer be obtained are included (gamedata/: the two update packs and the Windows 8 build's
extra art), kept for preservation; players supply the 5.11 APK themselves. This project is a
non-commercial preservation effort and is not affiliated with either company.
Credits
- Rule the Kingdom (2012-2014): developed by innoWate, published by Game Insight.
- The port: UncleAcid1, with Claude (Anthropic) under constant human supervision.
- Built on SDL3, OpenGL, pugixml, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, zlib, libvorbis / libogg, FreeType and SDL_ttf.