TinyCo to Bring Dinosaur Battles to Prehistoric City Builder Tiny Village

After soft-launching city-building game Tiny Village last month, TinyCo just started stepping on marketing pedal ahead of Thanksgiving and says that player-vs.-player features are coming shortly. The company, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is part of a class of mid-size gaming companies including Funzio, Booyah and Crowdstar that have high expectations to live up considering that they have raised around $20 million or more in venture capital. The new game is the company's latest big release after Tiny Zoo Friends and Tiny Pets, both of which are in a very crowded category of animal-themed games from Pocket Gems, then Backflip Studios and now Zynga. Tiny Village's plotline features villagers whose old home has been attacked by a T-Rex. Now scattered from their old village, they must build a new one and raise young dinosaurs to eventually take on their reptilian bully. There will be boss battles where players will eventually be able to fight the T-Rex with their team of dinosaurs, said the game's producer Michael Zhuang. "Having battles against bosses or between giant T-Rexes and pterodactyls will make it more interesting than a normal social game," Zhuang said. At the outset of the game, players have to do things like set up a rock quarry, a place to cut trees and tool stores so that they have items they can trade. Eventually they also will build pens where they can raise different types of dinosaurs, who can later be put to work at the quarries. (Say what you will about underage, dinosaur labor.) In this sense, Tiny Village marries some elements of the zoo genre with those of city builders like Z2Live's Medieval-themed app TradeNations, which was built with the help of Bight Games, a studio Electronic Arts later acquired. To critics who might say that the game bears more than a passing resemblance to TradeNations, Zhuang said the quirky artwork and the additional complexity of player-vs.-player mode are innovative in their own right. "We took the basic game mechanics from city or village builders, did our marketing research to find what would make a unique theme or IP and added mechanics that would make it more interesting," he said. "That's why we're adding the ability to raise dinosaurs." He added, "We did tests on different themes and art styles. We could've wound up doing an Aztec game but we tried it out on real users to see if the art style and theme was attractive to them. That's how we settled on a cave man theme. It became a launching off point." An Android version of the game will be coming shortly. TinyCo has some internal tools and technology that enable it to launch the same core game on both platforms without requiring major retooling. They didn't provide more detail than that though. There isn't a social integration yet with Facebook or other gaming networks like OpenFeint, but that will come soon. There will be classic features like the ability to visit villages of friends and neighbors, and then also the ability to trade resources with them. "We're not making inferior games like the way a lot of social game developers are. Our goal is to make real gaming experiences that are suited for convenience and mobility." The game is currently ranked at #46 on the iOS top-grossing charts in the U.S.

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TinyCo to Bring Dinosaur Battles to Prehistoric City Builder Tiny Village

Kim-Mai Cutler

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