Supersolid scored big with 10 million downloads for Super Penguins. Now the London mobile game startup hopes to produce the same results with Adventure Town.
The company is also announcing that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from European venture firms Index Ventures and Initial Capital. Supersolid will use the money to expand distribution and grow faster.
Supersolid is one of a ton of new game startups, but not many can brag about getting so many downloads for a first game. The huge success of Super Penguins will give the company the ability to cross-promote Adventure Town to its existing users, said Edward Chin, co-founder of Supersolid, in an interview with GamesBeat. The team specializes in charming games with high production values.
“We have experience in free-to-play games,” Chin said. “We hope that shows in Adventure Town.”
The company also has a seasoned team of former employees of the social gaming company Playfish, which Electronic Arts bought for $300 million in 2009. Supersolid is one of the progeny of Playfish along with Space Ape Games, another mobile game studio that also raised money from Initial Capital, among other investors. Space Ape Games recently launched Samurai Siege.
“There are quite a few former Playfish people in London,” Chin said. “We decided to do a smaller studio.”
The new game lets you build a town and fight other players. It is a city-building title akin to Zynga’s social game CityVille or Electronic Arts’ SimCity, except with the added fun of fighting between heroes and monsters. Players start out by rebuilding a destroyed town and attracting heroes to defeat menacing monsters. Players can go on quests and earn bounties. They can raid dungeons and fight progressively greater monsters.
Super Penguins is on iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle, and Kakao Games in South Korea. The latter is rare for a London company, but Super Penguins has done very well in that country. Super Penguins is available in 10 languages, but Adventure Town will be available in 13 languages.
“Adventure Town has been designed to be widely appealing to casual gamers on smart phones and tablets, while also offering depth of content that keeps players engaged in the long term,” said Kenneth Fejer, co-founder and creative director at Supersolid.
Co-founder Michelle Chuang added: “We’ve mixed role-playing game elements with city building and resource management mechanics to create a highly original mobile game. We hope the quality, style and variety of the art and animation makes Adventure Town a real delight to play, and a fresh experience for mobile gamers.”
Adventure Town is available on iOS and Android today and it will be available soon on Kindle Fire and Windows Phone 8. The game is built with the Unity 3D game engine.
The team has made other games while at Playfish such as Pet Society and Restaurant City. The company includes three of the founding employees of Playfish. They struck out on their own in 2012. The firm has six employees. Rivals include Supercell, Kiloo, Social Point, and a host of others.
Thanks to the success of the first game, the company has 265,000 fans on Facebook and 23,000 followers on Twitter.
Ben Holmes, a partner at Index Ventures, said, “This was a unique opportunity to invest in a proven games development team and we were highly impressed by current games and the game pipeline.”
Sami Lababidi from Initial Capital, said, “Supersolid are one of the most creative and productive gaming teams in the industry. Having worked alongside them for over 10 years I am delighted to be able to continue our relationship with this team.”