Animal Party Picks Up Speed on Facebook Under 6waves Publishing

Inside Social Games, By AJ Glasser, July 18, 2011

Animal Party is a pet simulation combined with treasure hunting and gardening from indie developer Tribal Crossing. The game was recently signed to a publishing agreement with 6waves, which has since accelerated the game’s growth through user acquisition, landing Animal Party on our weekly top 20s lists.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Animal Party currently has 766,922 monthly active users and 102,469 daily active users.

The game tasks players with collecting animals on various planets using bait. In this mode, gameplay is mostly hands-off, with the player clicking once to deploy a piece of bait and perhaps clicking again on the screen to chase off bait-stealing vermin. Different types of bait (e.g. meatballs, cheese) attract different types of animal, each of which makes up part a collection set that can be collected for a virtual currency and experience bonus. Once the player has lured the maximum number of animals that their spaceship can hold, they return to their garden base and receive virtual currency bonuses for animal weight, type and rarity.

The garden part of the game contains many familiar social game elements from both the pet and farming sim genres. Players clear land to plant crops, which they can harvest for bait and also interact with animals in the garden through a menu interface. Animals can perform tricks, can be petted or instructed to interact with other animals with menu options like “Flirt” or “Boo!” To keep the pets’ happiness rating high, they must also build food dispensers and toys in their garden.

Social features in the game include the usual Wall-sharing and friend invites, along with the pet-specific mechanic where players are prompted to send animals to friends to get them playing. Players can also visit neighbors’ gardens to care for their animals and crops or fend off attacking vermin.

Animal Party is monetized through the sale of premium decoration items, ship upgrades for capturing higher-quality animals, and energy refills. There’s a pretty firm limit to the amount of time you can spend playing the game for “free.” Between collecting animals, clearing land, planting crops, and caring for animals, lower-level players frequently run out of energy well shy of completing construction projects or collecting all animals available on a planet. New planets and items for the garden can only be unlocked at higher levels or in exchange for Facebook Credits, which puts pressure on new users to spend early on.

Tribal Crossing will likely adjust the gameplay over time in response to user feedback. Before signing with 6waves, the developer relied entirely on feedback from users acquired in a limited marketing campaign to adjust the Animal Party into the game it is today.

“What you see now in Animal Party is a fundamentally different game from our first public version (our first version didn’t even have a garden),” Tribal Crossing CEO Tommy Wu tells ISG in an email. “We were set on running marketing campaigns on our own and had just finished finished building a system to measure lifetime value of users by different entry points so that we could have dynamic CPI bids by traffic source.”

Wu says that the biggest challenge small indie studios like his face aren’t development costs, but rather, user acquisition costs. “With the game frameworks we have built over the past year, we could build a new game as complex as Animal Party for ~$200,000,” he says, “but if you look at Zynga’s last quarter, you’ll see they spent twice that amount per day in marketing costs.”

Signing with 6waves eases the burden a bit, but Tribal Crossing still has to keep their game fresh to please the users that 6waves acquires. To that end, Wu says that the developer is in the process of considering new features to add to the game. There is a challenge, however, as Tribal Crossing doesn’t want to make Animal Party too complex just for the sake of a cool game mechanic.

“We have had ambitious plans to do a breeding system for a while but we aren’t sure if it’s something we want to incorporate as a feature in this game or as a standalone title,” he says. “One thing we have not exposed to the user is how the animals interact with each other. There’s actually a sophisticated AI system and we’re able to give animals different personalities.  We’re really excited to see where we can take that (any ideas are welcome)!”

You can follow Animal Party’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Go on an Interplanetary Animal Rescue in Animal Party

Social Gaming Today, July 27, 2011 by Blake Merriam

Looking for a game where you can capture a cute Goth Bunny with bacon grown on a bush? Or build a nice Eggloo for your Geckos? We thought so and you’re in luck. A new game published by 6waves, Animal Party, allows you to do just that and more. While Animal Party has a lot of features similar to other social games like farming and collecting pet animals, it has incredibly adorable art work and a lot of features that you can jump right into. 

In Animal Party, you must recover your animal friends who have fled your party planet after it’s been party crashed by the evil Lord Wedgy. You must visit various planets and use a wide assortment of bait to lure them onto your space ship to get them home to Paradiso, you personal planet. Rescued animals may stay in your garden in Paradiso for some time before being released back into the wild on their home planet. Those who stay need to be provided appropriate housing, entertainment, food, and of course, LOVE from you as their caretaker.

The first of two major components to Animal Party is your garden. You must  turn your garden into an inviting and comfortable place for your animal guests. Different animal species require specific housing, such as a Fox Hole or a Bearstump Cave. They also need to be provided with toys to entertain themselves with, such as pinball machines, balloons and sand boxes. You also need to root out bothersome pests such as Evil Weevils who terrorise your fun loving animals. Improving and expanding your garden allows you to house and attract more exotic animals that you capture to stay in your garden. Decorations, such as fireflower vases and moon palms, are also important to have to attract more animals to your garden. Interacting with your animals is also important. A nice feature allows you to have two of your animals engage each other in play. A la Farmville, you also can grow crops which come in a dizzying variety of types, such as meatballs, ice cream, carrots and even bacon. These are used as bait to attract other animals as you travel to other planets to rescue them.

According to Tommy Wu, CEO of Animal Party developer Tribal Crossing: 

"Sometimes the animals will surprise you with the interactions they have with each other.  Look for us to further develop their personalities in future releases!"

The second part of Animal Party is when you take your space ship to other planets in the galaxy to find lost animals of your planet. The larger your ship, the more animals you can take on. As mentioned before, you use different kinds of bait to attract animals. Bunnies are big fans of carrot cake. Hippos have a real sweet tooth for peach cobbler. You get bonuses for capturing animals that are of a bigger than normal size or collecting all types of a certain species. Some animals won’t take certain bait, so make sure bring the most appealing bait.

The two things that really stand out for me in Animal Party is the great “look and feel” Tribal Crossing has created and the huge variety of things to do in the game right from the start. Usually, social games start simple then grow in complexity, but Animal Party gives you a lot to do right away. This can feel a little overwhelming at first, but regular play helps you to understand it all. Indeed, according to Wu, regular play has it’s benefits: "Players will meet a host of characters in Animal Party that need their help. While most of them seem like they have good intentions, all is not what it seems. As players continue to explore the world of Animal Party, they will uncover a deep story line."

I’m really impressed by the number of things there are to do in Animal Party. The animals are all incredibly cute and creative and the look of the game is a real feast for the eyes. If pet collecting and farming games are something you can’t get enough of, go ahead and join the Animal Party!

Real World NoSQL: Membase at Tribal Crossing

GigaOM, By Guy Harrison Feb. 5, 2011, 9:00am PT

With all the excitement surrounding the relatively recent wave of non-relational – otherwise known as “NoSQL” – databases, it can be hard to separate the hype from the reality. There’s a lot of talk, but how much NoSQL action is there in the real world? In this series, we’ll take a look at some real-world NoSQL deployments.

Tribal Crossing develops online social games such as “Animal Party.” Although games like Animal Party are embedded in Facebook, the Tribal Crossing’s game servers are hosted in the Amazon EC2 ( amzn) cloud. Like most social games, Tribal Crossing applications have a very high database write rate – changes to the game state need to be stored so the user doesn’t lose her game score, “loot” or location. Tribal Crossing migrated from MySQL to Membase with the aim of supporting a higher write rate: it expected to support about 10 times the write load compared to what is possible with MySQL.

The Membase database system is based on the widely used Memcached distributed object cache. Many websites use Memcached in conjunction with MySQL; Memcached keeps copies of frequently used data in a memory cache distributed across a cluster of machines, and the application can reduce the load on MySQL by reading from this cache. Membase presents a Memcache-compatible interface, but adds persistent storage for the cached objects, effectively replacing MySQL as the disk storage engine. Applications can therefore, in theory, replace both MySQL and Memcached with Membase through relatively minor changes to application code.

Tribal Crossing wanted to focus on game design rather than database management, and so sought a solution that would scale in line with user demand without manual intervention. Membase’s transparent scaling – which allows Tribal Crossing to increase capacity quickly and easily by adding more nodes to the Membase cluster — helps Tribal Crossing adapt to boosts in game traffic when games “go viral” on Facebook.

As with many migrations from relational to non-relational database, the application needed to accept responsibility for many of the services traditionally provided by the RDBMS. For instance, Tribal Crossing had to implement their own locking system — the application stores lock information explicitly in Membase, rather than letting the database automatically manage concurrency.

As a pure key-value store, Membase doesn’t enforce a specific schema; the application can store any “value” it likes against a specific key. As is typical in key-value stores, the value stored is closely related to program objects used in the application code. This simplifies the interactions between the application and the database, since the usual object-relational mapping (OPM) isn’t necessary. Tribal Crossing also appreciated the ability to modify the schema as required by the application without having to issue time-consuming “alter table” statements. However, this “schema-less” architecture renders the database less suitable for ad-hoc analysis and data-mining; data for business analysis is currently written out to a separate (MongoDB) database.

“So far, we are pretty happy with what Membase has provided us,” says Shawn Chiao, co-founder of Tribal Crossing. “We did have some hiccups in our production environment from being an early adopter, but the Membase folks have been very helpful in troubleshooting and providing updates to address issues that came up.”

Conclusion

After covering these five use case,s the main conclusion one can draw about NoSQL in real-world settings is that extreme claims about the demise of the relational database are exaggerated. The real-world practitioners I’ve talked with have chosen a NoSQL database as the best database tool for specific application goals. For most, a desire to achieve higher levels of application scalability lead to a decision to sacrifice relational database features. Many of these implementations are in their early stages, and some are yet to be fully proven.

We’re bound to hear more stories – both positive and negative – as these and other projects roll out. What seems certain is that more companies will examine non-relational alternatives, and that these alternatives will mature and increasingly offer valid alternatives to the RDBMS for some types of applications, especially those operating at high scale.

To learn more about the factors driving big data and optimal strategies for solving it, including from Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP database leaders, come to our Big Data conference held on March 23 in NYC.

Guy Harrison is a director of research and development at Quest Software, and has over 20 years of experience in database design, development, administration, and optimization. He can be found on the internet at www.guyharrison.net, on e-mail at guy.harrison@quest.com and is @guyharrison on twitter.

Animal Party is as weird as it is fun

Gamezebo, Jan 28, 2011, 2:22pm

Animal Party is a strange game. You can grow bushes of meatballs and Swiss cheese, and then use that as bait to catch giant worms and purple foxes. See, I told you it was strange. But for all its weirdness, it’s also weirdly compelling. It’s like a mash up of Pokemon and FarmVille, but much better than that probably sounds.

Your home base is a garden area that serves many different functions. You can grow bait, which comes in the form of everything from apple pie to sweet onions. In a nice twist, each type of bait doesn’t come with its own time limit with regards to how long it takes to grow. Instead, you get to choose how long it will take each time you plant something. The more hours the plant has to grow, the more bait you’ll be able to collect. It’s a great feature and really allows you to play the game around your schedule.

But the garden is also where you’ll keep all your animals. You’ll need to buy and build places for them to sleep, toys for them to play, and machines to dispense their food. Depending on how many creatures you have, you’ll need to have a certain amount of each. You can also decorate the garden with a whole range of options to choose from, and you can also upgrade and improve your spaceship, which stays docked in the garden.

Suffice to say there’s a whole lot to do. What can get annoying, however, is that building most objects in the game requires an absurdly large number of resources. And these resources can only be acquired in one of two ways: asking your friends or buying diamonds. It’s pretty standard by now to have these kinds of resources in a Facebook game, but Animal Party simply requires far too many to complete even the smallest of objects.

The other major part of the game is the actual animal catching. You can take your spaceship to a variety of planets, each of which is home to different species for you to catch. And catching them is incredibly simple. All you do is select a type of bait and drop it on the ground and eventually an animal will come. Not all will take the bait, but most will and you can beam them aboard your ship. There’s a very large number of cute little critters to find and some of them will even come back to stay with you in the garden, provided you have enough space. But just the idea of trying to catch them all makes Animal Party incredibly addictive. Plus, they're pretty darn cute.

It may be weird and goofy, but Animal Party offers up quite a bit of fun. There’s simply a whole lot of content here, from catching and collecting animals to decorating and expanding your garden. It’s incredibly addictive and the sheer absurdity of much of the game lends it a real unique sense of charm. Only in Animal Party does a talking porcupine with an eyepatch not feel out of place.

Rescue Party Facebook Game Review

Posted on September 8, 2010 by PinkGarden

Rescue Party is a new Facebook game sporting a rather generic name but being a unique offering combining aspects from “gotta catch ‘em all” type games, farming foods (that you use to rescue creatures on different planets), to village decoration, crafting items, and space exploration. It is addictive and well rounded with the inclusion of missions to complete.

The basic gameplay formula consists of planting your crops (which aren’t the usual farming crops but instead are items such as Meatballs or Flour Power), each appealing to different species of creatures and some being more effective at different planets. When the crops are ready you harvest them and that’s where the real fun comes in in Rescue Party.

Using your energy:
Most actions take energy. Energy regenerates over time, can be bought or requested as gifts. Traveling to planets takes energy, plus dropping each food. Flying back does not cost energy. Harvesting crops takes some. Some interactions with your creatures will also cost you energy, such as recieving a present from one.  Almost all of your actions will gain you experience, and as you level up you will gain access to more items, ships, foods, etc.

Going to space:
You have a space ship that will let you travel to other planets that have endangered creatures. When you’re there you use energy to drop a food of your choice and a little creature will come and eat it. The creature will then get beamed up into your space ship’s cargo and you can take it home. Only some creatures will stay with you (if hearts appear when the creature is beamed up that means it wants to stay with you). However each one you rescue counts towards the individual species’ rescue status. All start out endangered, but once you’ve rescued five of one species they will be “At Risk” and so on. This is a fun formula and having that special creature want to come home with you is exciting. You can’t rename your creatures, but it makes finding the perfect creature all the more exciting!

Beware the Evil Weevils:
Sometimes they will try to steal the food you drop, be quick and whack ‘em and they’ll drop that food! They’ll also sometimes appear at your planet making your animals rather scared so be sure to whack them then too!

Your ship:
When you first start out your ship can hold only four creatures per trip, but you can upgrade your ship to hold more and you can upgrade your ship’s tier which will help you rescue higher ranking creatures. Your ship can be customized with alot of different looks that are purely aesthtic.

Back at your planet:
All of the creatures you’ve rescued will wander around, sometimes interacting with other creatures. They are interesting as they usually stay near their home (if you’ve made them one) but do venture away.  You can pet your creatures to make them happy. Once they are happy they will have give you random presents ranging from coins to rare items. You can usually get a present from each of your animals about once a day.

Getting more creatures:
If you’ve reached your current animal limit any new rescues will wait outside the fence of your planet. You can either release a current creature you have to make room for a new one, buy an animal house if needed to house more of the same species, or upgrade your planets size and creature limit.

Houses:
You can ony have one of each species until you build a species house. The houses are all very nicely designed and unique for each species. Once you’ve built (and aquired the building materials from you’re friends) you can then move in up to two of that species. Each house can be upgraded to accomadate three of a species. Each upgrade takes more materials that you will need to have gifted to you. You can of course post requests via your Facebook wall feed.

Cooking items:
You can also cook special rare recipies in the cooking pot. These are the only way to attract the rarest creatures. You can buy a spice grinder that will make spices to use in the cooking pot. These will need to be upgarded with materials too so you can make harder recipies.

The store and money:
The store is stocked with a nice amount of items that can be bought with coins, and there also items to be bought with cash. You earn one cash for each level up and also by logging in and collecting the daily bonus on the seventh day if done without missing a day, or purchased with real money.

Interactions With Friends: 4/5
The feeds to post to your Facebook wall are nice and varied, with the typical level up bonus or request for items, plus more unique ones for achievements and short videos when you’ve rescued a certain number of a species. They aren’t however over intusive with constant “Would you like to post this to your wall” messages.

You can also visit your neighbors and fertilze their crops and collect an item daily from their house. You won’t see them when they come to visit you though.

Graphics: 4/5
Would be a 5/5 but the lack of a full screen option hurts the game. The graphics are all very nice and the animals move and act well. A top-notch looking Facebook game.

It may look too cutesy for some, but this isn’t a generic “rescue animals” game. It starts out with a Star Wars “In a galaxy far far away” intro and has a Pokemon “gotta catch ‘em all ” feel to it (without the battles).

Hookability (How well the game keeps you entertained and wanting to come back for more): 5/5
It is very addicting trying to get the best looking planet among your friends, leveling up, and most importantly having those special creatures at your planet. That alone should keep most people hooked but the additional missions, farming, and crafting items is enough to keep anyone busy.

Overall: 5/5
The developers are active on their discussion forum, answering questions and taking into consideration players’ feedback. They are constantly making improvements to the game. This is an up and coming Facebook game that should be able to challenge the big ones as it gains momentum. Definetly give it a try!