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.

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!

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.

As games become increasingly social, games built on user generated content are becoming increasingly common. Games that allow users to co-create the game play experience can be quite powerful – although whenever you give users control, you always run the risk of a plethora of garbage. That said, it is usually necessary to police the content, but if done well, sharing your own game creations and contributions can be a very compelling part of social gaming.

Here is our list of some of our favorite games and applications that are built with user generated content. Some are well known, and some are new and obscure. Nevertheless, we feel that these titles have great potential as well as excellent tools for the users themselves. Again, though, this list is subjective, and if you feel something is missing, then by all means share it!

10. Guess the Sketch Challenge – Okay, whether or not this contains UGC depends on your perspective. Regardless, players are given a name and have to draw it in some way so that others can guess what it is. As such, each game is affected by the skill and creativeness that a drawing player brings to the table.

9. Quizzes – Not a true game, but certainly a popular application containing user generated content. This app lets anyone jump in and not only take various popular quizzes created by others, but lets you create any type of quiz you can imagine.

8. Name It! – Very similar to Scattergories, a party game provides you with a list of ten categories and a letter of the alphabet. Then, in 60 seconds, you have to type in a word that begins with the selected letter in that category. However, unlike Scattergories which has 192 categories, Name It players can add their own. In fact, within the first week, the app had over a thousand categories.

7. Birthday Cards – Okay, not a game by any stretch, but certainly a great app. Users can come in, mark important dates (duh, birthdays) and create their own custom cards to send to their friends. Nevertheless, the intuitive creator given to the users allows them to create their own ideas, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed, considering its popularity.

6. Bumper Sticker – One of the top applications on Facebook in general. This title lets users join and create all kinds of bumper stickers for the public to use on their profiles. With so many users, there are a vast number of bad ones, but that isn’t too surprising. Nonetheless, there still are some hilarious gems amongst the masses.

5. Social Arcade – This is an interesting bugger. It doesn’t have a whole lot of monthly users, but it contains a plethora of user created platform games. While they are not all good, the cool part of this app is that users can utilize their mini game-engine type tools to design and build your own platform game. Furthermore, there seems to be plans to all for other game templates beyond platforming such as racing, RPGs, and RTS genres. That said, this title has a lot of latent potential just waiting to be unleashed.

3. Photograb – This is a very simple shape recognition game. Players are given a small portion of an image and must find that section within a larger picture within a limited period of time. The more matches they make, the more points they earn. However, players can create their own version of this small game using pictures they have in their Facebook gallery and select what section of the image to display to the player.

2. Pictograph – A new game to Facebook, this word play game lets players try to figure out famous quotes or sayings as they apply to movies, holidays, or just everyday life (i.e. picture of a screw + picture of a baseball = “screwball”). Moreover, anyone can jump in and create their own word puzzles that will be shared and rated amongst anyone that plays.

1. Graffiti – This application is truly cool. Essentially, it gives people that have a little bit of artistic talent and allows them to create some astounding art work and share it with the community and even draw on your friends’ profiles. Can drawing be considered a game? It depends on your perspective, but regardless, this is fantastic app with fantastic UGC.

A new Facebook puzzle game called Pictograph has just been released that looks great coming out of the gate.

Remember when Bugs Bunny would mock Elmer Fudd with signs that had a screw and a baseball drawn on it (“screwball“)? Well, that’s what this game is all about. Okay, so Bugs isn’t part of it, but the drawings are. This puzzle game gives you a set of images that you have to decipher into a word or phrase.

The game is very reminiscent of the games you used to play in the back of magazines as a kid, but the difference now is that these puzzles make up common phrases and relate to various current events. Some challenges include the movie, When Harry Met Sally…, Will Farrell in Elf, and of course holiday puzzles for Christmas. However, perhaps what is most enticing is that the game is not limited to content created by the developer.

In general one of the more interesting aspects of social game play is the ability to create and share content with friends, and that is exactly what you can do with Pictograph. The app has a simple and intuitive creation system that lets you type in a phrase and select from a plethora of images in order to “encode” what you are trying to say. Then, when a player starts up a game, they are presented with what seems to be a randomly picked puzzle (unless you are playing a specific topic challenge like the ones mentioned prior) that has been created by someone else.

Of course, the game contains traditional social capabilities as well. This includes the standard scoring, leader board, and challenge systems that encompass the majority of Facebook titles. You can even “taunt” other players within the rankings.

Pictograph is certainly a fun game and deserves to be up in the higher tiers of the app gallery. Its simple, nostalgic game play makes for fun and thought invoking puzzles, and the fact that players can create their own adds a wonderful social element and a near infinite number of possibilities. It is certainly a game worth checking out.