'Take your friends too' as Zynga launches big new Facebook game
This is a huge step away from FarmVille! Zynga's new Adventure World game lets your pals get in on the action on the incident-packed road to El Dorado..
The game - "Grab life by the boulders," says the video which you can see here - will be live on Facebook in the next few weeks.
It was developed in Zynga Boston (formerly Conduit Labs) where boss Nabeel Hyatt told the website TechCrunch that the core technology, a flash-based game engine, had been developed from scratch over the past year. He says this is Zynga’s largest, most graphic and feature-rich game yet - with more than 20,000 objects!
Adventure World is set during what Zynga calls the ‘golden age of exploration.’ Players get to unlock new universes of exploration, discovery, and puzzle-solving.
"Think Indiana Jones-meets Super Mario Brothers meets FarmVille," says TechCrunch. The social adventure theme is a big step away rom the ‘Ville’ and ‘Wars’ themes of recent recent Zyngagames.
Adventurers visit five worlds in ‘Mezzo-America’ :Deep Jungle, Mountain, Cavern, Volcano and El Dorado.
They embark on 200 different quests: encountering ancient puzzles, battling nasty critters and unlocking clues on the quest to discover the secret of El Dorado, the City of Gold.
Players can customise a 3-D avatar and buy virtual goods via gold coins to help them along the challenging road to El Dorado.
The game is 40 times the size of past Zynga games and includes over 1,000 art assets (e.g.five kinds of snakes, four kinds of spiders, two kinds or rams). Players can choose from over 10,000 different avatars.
Hyatt says this is the first major puzzle-based game for Zynga. It is also the first where the players have a ‘sense of consequence’ - they can do things in a good way or bad way.
The new "social functionality" in Adventure World is that players can invite a crew of up to 12 Facebook friends on a game board to share their adventure.
For Zynga, Adventure World is a big step away from FarmVille-style games towards larger, more-feature rich games. Avatars are in 3D and the game itself is in 2D. Hyatt says Adventure World will be the first of many expansive, ‘social adventure’ games in the Zynga library.
Says TechCrunch: "Adventure World took a year to build, and the company actually invested in building a whole new game engine for the title, so clearly, the company expects this one to be a hit."