Zynga hasn’t had the best few months from a financial perspective. But the giant social-gaming publisher is still managing to convince developers to join its third-party mobile game development platform. Yesterday, develoepr Crash Lab said Zynga would publish its Twist Pilot game on the Apple iTunes App Store.
Twist Pilot is the third game to launch under the Zynga Partners for Mobile program. It’s an action-puzzle game with 72 levels. While Zynga’s market value has fallen, its reach is still well above 300 million monthly active users, and that makes it attractive to mobile game developers who want to get noticed among hundreds of thousands of games.
In Twist Pilot, you control the character Phil through a gauntlet to collect gold rings while avoiding hitting the sides. It takes getting used to the physics to get through the obstacles. It has Game Center integration for leaderboards and achievements, costs 99 cents, and will be published soon on Google Play on the Android platform.
Twist Pilot comes from Crash Lab, a studio created by Steve Ellis and Martin Wakeley, a couple of veteran game developers from England. Ellis previously worked at Free Radical Design, and Wakeley was a game designer at Rare.
“We had the freedom to make the game we wanted to make, and Zynga has been hands off,” Wakeley said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Wakeley said that startups have to team up with bigger companies to get their mobile games in front of users. Zynga has that reach, and that’s why they’re are using them.
“We have the best chance of getting noticed this way,” Ellis said.
The Crash Labs team started at the beginning of the year. It has several other games in the works.
Zynga’s other third-party mobile games are Phosphor Games’ Horn and Atari’s Super Bunny Breakout
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6BLFJoryTE]