Just days after a short, worrying episode during which Facebook suspended all of its apps, LOLapps is anteing up with a new title: Ravenwood Fair, built by a team led by the legendary id Software co-founder John Romero. He’s currently working with the developer as a consultant.

Ravenwood fair follows in the footsteps of LOLapps’ last game, Critter Island, featuring a cast of cute, bobble-headed animals perusing attractions. But the island has been swapped out for a forest, and the foundation laid for a more in-depth game.

Playing Fair

In most Facebook games, it’s hard to find anything remotely unfriendly, whether in the characters or the scenery. Ravenwood Fair starts the player out alone in a scary-looking forest, with only an odd-looking raven, Huginn, as a guide. (In Norse mythology, Huginn and Muninn are Odin’s pet speaking ravens.)

Another moment, and seasoned Facebook players will sense an influence: FrontierVille. Your first job is to chop down a tree. When you do, prizes representing coins, experience and various items pop out to be picked up. Just as in FrontierVille, it will be a constant job and battle to keep the encroaching forest back.

But where FrontierVille merges in elements of FarmVille, ultimately becoming a farming game, Ravenwood’s heart is still in island and business sims. After the tree is down, you get to build your first attraction, a hotdog cart. Each new attraction adds to the “fun” of your fair, with successively higher levels of fun attracting more guests.

Your guests will wander the fair for as long as the fun level is high enough, and if you click on them, they’ll talk. Sometimes they spout one-liners, and other times make a statement or question that can be answered. While there’s nothing like a dialogue tree yet, and the responses are usually little in-jokes (one of my fair-goers mentions that he liked the fair in Chrono Trigger), there’s clearly potential in Ravenwood to grow an interactive single-player game.

The trees, by the way, are more than a barrier, harboring various unseen monsters that can scare your guests silly. When this happens, it’s necessary to sooth the guests. There are also protective objects that can be placed around the fair, like a “Happy Oak”, that keep back the bugbears.

Deeper in the forest, there are also prizes: new fair attractions that would otherwise take resources and money to build. If you can cut a path to these attractions and cut away the thorns, you’re free to claim them. Since the starting forest is fairly large, there’s a light exploration element here that will keep players happy chopping away at trees.

Overall, Ravenwood manages to pull off the combination of cutesy and creepy well, with an art style suggesting a certain Victorian eccentricity.

Single or Social?

One of the characters in the game innocently asked me: Do I prefer to play by myself or with others? I have a question of my own: Is LOLapps running a sneaky user survey?

Ravenwood comes, of course, with all the standard social appurtenances. You can make and visit friends; when at a friend’s fair, instead of playing lackey and cleaning up trash, you actually get to play their games, and get experience for it to boot. Of course, there’s also an endless supply of trees to chop.

At your own fair, the main incitement to interact with friends is to ask them for resources needed to complete an attraction. But the resources are also pretty cheap, running one Facebook Credit per (or 10 cents), and you can always chop trees or break rocks to find them.

There’s plenty to keep you occupied, in fact. To draw one more comparison to FrontierVille, in that game the average session is quite short — chop down a tree or two, and you’re done for the time being.

In Ravenwood, you can chop trees or refill attractions for uninterrupted minutes at a time without running of out energy; in fact, one of the resources that pops up most often is more energy. There’s also a constant supply of mostly resource-based quests to complete.

And there are always your non-player visitors to talk to. For now, the dialogue options are pretty limited, but as noted above, there’s clear opportunity to flesh out the interactions. One reason to do that might be questing; another might be to simply keep the player company. After all, even most single-player games are full of non-player characters (even if you’re generally killing them).

The point is that Ravenwood might be spending less time on deepening social interactions, and more on making a game that people want to play for itself. The involvement of Romero, a traditional game designer, only strengthens that theory.

As it is, Ravenwood Fair is a pretty good game. If you don’t like chopping trees or watching anthropomorphic animals play games, it might get boring, but both of those activities will be engaging enough for the typical Facebook gamer.

What’s more interesting about Ravenwood, though, is its potential to develop from a sim into a more interactive RPG. That’s a short step away, but we’ll have to wait to see if LOLapps decides to go in that direction.

Avatars have been popular for nearly as long as the web itself, and customizing them has been a key part of gaming and virtual worlds, from Second Life to IMVU to other sites worldwide. Likewise, paying for avatar decorations has been an important source of virtual goods revenue for many games.

But the concept has gotten relatively little attention among social game developers. Most games have been focused on mechanics like harvesting and baking, and while those typically do provide players for avatars, the offerings have been slim.

That’s changing, though, as can be seen in CrowdStar’s new Facebook virtual shopping game, It Girl, and in a new addition to Zynga’s hit farming simulation, FarmVille.

It Girl launched in public beta around a month ago (see our early review here), but it just went fully live, and as you can see, it’s very focused on avatars. The game has users going through stores in a virtual city, trying to collect the hottest outfits to wear while battling each other, with the winner determined by who is dressed the best. The focus, of course, is to find the rarest and most valuable garb to assemble into the most powerfully stylish outfit.

The concept has been in the works for much longer. Crowdstar has been offering games in Japan for the past year, and learned from local publishing partners and its own observations that avatar customization was helping to generate impressively high revenue per user. Executive chairman Peter Relan tells us the company saw that the games that monetized the best focused on building up avatars.

Its Japanese experience helped form the avatar system in It Girl, a growing game that’s now up to nearly 4.88 million monthly active users and 703,000 daily actives, according to AppData. The result so far, Relan says, is three times the ARPU of the company’s other games.

Zynga has also made avatar customization more front and center in FarmVille. Although the company has provided basic avatars and outfits since the game launched last year, it has greatly expanded the possibilities now, including shirts, shoes, bottoms, accessories, and also costumes for Halloween. Some of the outfits are free, but others cost either FarmVille Cash or Coins, and also offer experience points if purchased. While they don’t appear to currently offer any in-game functionality, they have other social value for users.

Users can already have their avatars wander around to friends’ farms, and do things like tend their crops in exchange for more points. Now, those avatars can be fully decked-out in polo shirts, ghost outfits, or anything else. It’s not clear if Zynga was inspired by its own efforts in Japan and what it saw there, other avatars in games, or even CrowdStar, but the feature — even if it was added to an already-mature game — appears set to make users happier, and bring in more money.

For more on virtual goods, including revenue growth in the US market and best practices, be sure to check out our Inside Virtual Goods reports.

Small social game developer A Bit Lucky is quickly becoming known as one of the more optimistic voices in the industry. Since launching their first game, Lucky Train, in late July, co-founders Frederic Descamps and Jordan Maynard have publicly stated their confidence in Facebook as a platform several times.

“People say oh, there’s too much competition, the market is too saturated,” Descamps told us recently. “I think it’s the opposite. Yeah, Zynga has brand recognition, and people say we have to break their chokehold. I say, what chokehold? I want Zynga to do even better. Others can still do well by innovating.”

Descamp’s theory is that social gaming is becoming, if anything, less of a winner-take-all industry, with more options attracting more new users and more experienced users branching out to new options. He compares this to other industries. “In the entertainment industry, there are weeks that three good movies come out. Do people say, no, I can only see one movie? Blizzard has three games coming out,” he says. “We did an informal survey: would you buy them all? Everyone ended up saying, yeah, I would.”

The theory has been borne out to some degree. An Inside Social Games analysis recently found that users were moving away from the biggest games into smaller titles; Lucky Train, for its part, has drawn in 1.6 million monthly active users, and continues to grow. “The supply is lagging behind the demand,” says Descamps.

Another thing that cencerns other developers is the cost of operating on Facebook. Again, Descamps seems unworried. “We released the core game with no wall posts. The only way to propagate the game was to invite your friends. It worked, and, and to this day we spend very little on advertising,” he says.

“People also say social gaming is going to be like other gaming. They’re worried about the curse of studios -– running out of money, and being dependent on publishers,” Descamps continues. “For now, you can go direct. That’s changing, accessing users will require advertising. But I always ask, in which industries do you not need marketing? It’s still way less than launching on a PC or console.”

For now, A Bit Lucky is continuing work on Lucky Train, which Descamps says is showing some interesting metrics. The average user session is 39 minutes, for example, far higher than the average, and there are spikes of activity on the weekends. Both stats run contrary to the theory that Facebook gamers only want short-session gameplay while at work or looking after children.

One key challenge is improving retention. Lucky Train players show 35 percent month-over-month retention, which the company is happy with, but it’s also working on a major addition: resource trading between players. The core mechanic of receiving and sending trains is suited perfectly to creating an in-game economy, in which players only have access to some resources and must trade for others.

Long-term, Descamps says he’s interested in “trans-gaming”, a concept much like multi-platform gaming but using different versions of the game suited to each platform it’s on, rather than having the same game on each platform. He’s not alone; Ubisoft recently announced that it would be pursuing the same strategy, although in the opposite direction, creating specialized Facebook versions of its console games.

One more thing that A Bit Lucky hasn’t previously disclosed its its list of investors. The company’s seed round of $2.6 million attracted over a dozen investors, including SV Angel, Founder Collective, Felicis Ventures, IGN CEO Mark Jung, and Google head of M&A David Lawee.

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Network is proud to announce our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, exploring the key uncertainties and opportunities in social games and applications in 2011, happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Who Is Speaking?

We’re excited and honored to announce the following 15 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Bill Gossman, CEO, hi5
  
• Bret Taylor, CTO, Facebook
• Deborah Liu, Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
• Eric Chu, Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
• Kevin Chou, Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
• Manu Rekhi, GM Games, Content, and Platform, MySpace
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Raph Koster, Former President, Metaplace; VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor
• Sean Ryan, EVP and GM Games, News Corporation
• Sebastien de Halleux, Co-founder and COO, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts)
• Vish Makhijani, SVP Business Operations, Zynga
  
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Network
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network

A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Register Now

A limited set of 20 “early announcement” tickets is now available at a special announcement price of $149. This price will change when these first 20 tickets are sold out. Space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco!

Here’s a twist. Normally, games ask users to make as much money as possible, but a new title from App Genius on Facebook is putting that concept on its head, and asking users to spend. The game is called, appropriately enough, My Mad Millions.

A text-based role-playing game, My Mad Millions is unintuitive, but no less interesting for that fact. It’s a combination of familiar RPG elements and new, and somewhat amusing ideas that ask the question: can you spend $300 million? At first glance, the game appears drab, but it has an underlying strategy to it that might present itself as appealing to some users.

The $300 million, new players learn, is from an inheritance. There is more of this huge fortune to be had, but it can only be earned by spending all $300 million within a finite amount of time. Following a preset series of rules (e.g. no buying a pile of Picasso paintings, then burning them), players must reach a net value of $0. That means they can’t own a thing; all purchases must be rented, consumable, or gifts.

Believe it or not, this goal is harder then one might think. Players begin with a basic “storyline” of quests that spend the largest chunk of money. These involve renting a home, quitting a job, and generally just splurging every penny possible. In order to limit the expenditure, each action requires the standard energy statistic. So for players to spend the maximum amount possible in one sitting, they must carefully choose who they hire for these quests (e.g. real estate agents during the quest to rent a home) and what they rent.

Initially, this isn’t too hard, but players quickly realize that as expensive as a castle might be, it still barely makes a dent in the $300 million. In order to spend more, players can also utilize energy to participate in Daily Sprees. Similar to the primary Spending Spree quests, these take a day to complete and many require “Entourage” members to activate.

This is where the first social mechanic comes into play. Rather than a “join my mafia” concept to increase power, friends are required to spend money on. The more friends in the Entourage, the more money can be expended for certain quests. And since this can only be done every 24 hours, a greater number of friends is much more efficient.

Thinking the Daily Spree would help dent our net worth, we started a number of these quests, but have yet to even spend $3 million. So what’s one to do next? Well, gambling is an option, although of course the goal is to lose. Again, despite what one might think, it’s harder than it sounds.

Gambling, first off, is limited by a stat called Casino Plays. Gaining 15 a day (more if players increase their “Attack Power” upon leveling up), users can bet a maximum of $20,000 (this increases as they increase their “Defensive Power” stat). It’s a good way to lose money, but just as effective at winning it. Thus far, players can play poker, slots, war, race horses or just pick a number, but there is only one turn for each game and everything is purely luck.

The only elements that are not luck-based are using the Shoppes and battling other players. The former are pretty simple, as users can purchase pretty much anything they ever wanted for themselves and their friends. Nevertheless, there is a limit to how much can be spent, controlled by a stat called “Spending Power.” That is the maximum dollar amount that can be used at any given time, and must recharge once some of it is used. However, it can be increased as yet another base statistic.

As the user levels, they can battle other players. Each battle is gamble in and of itself. Playing against one another in simple games such as dice or high card, they bet expensive items (such as a $5000 gaming machine) with the winner giving it away to the loser. These items are all purchased, not rented, so they add to one’s net worth. However, in order to participate in battles, they must be bought, and losing will merely add more to one’s value.

This is particularly cut throat due to the tremendous competitive avenue the game takes. More than just leaderboards, recent announcements from the developers have noted that they will periodically take the top 20 percent of active players and reward them with 50 percent of the game’s real-world revenue. It brings a whole new meaning to having to spend money to make money.

Players will eventually be able to unlock the abilities to bet on sports and invest in the stock market (a good way to lose money nowadays, it seems). However, a certain number of Spending Spree quests must be finished first, or they must be purchased through the virtual currency MMM Points. Additionally, players must change their banks daily, lest they risk gaining significant chunks of interest.

There’s a lot going on with My Mad Millions, and the challenge in trying to spend a massive amount of money is amusing from a strategic point of view. The game’s weakness is its uninspiring — dare we say, low budget — presentation; although crisp and clean, all the imagery is photographs and the game feels most akin to a business plan or spreadsheet.

There’s so much to manage, in fact, that My Mad Millions is likely to find a hit or miss response from players.

It’s common for iPhone social titles is to follow closely in the footsteps of past Facebook concepts. TeamLava is taking this route again with a restaurant sim, the new iPad and iPhone title, Restaurant Story. Marking the third title in their social game series, this free-to-play game attempts to live up to the reputation of its predecessors, City Story and Farm Story.

Like the two before it, Restaurant Story has from a core game play element that is virtually identical to existing Facebook games. Luckily, the overall quality of the game is decent, and the actual social elements go far beyond that of most other mobile games.

The basic game formula is familiar enough. Utilizing the Café World method, players build stoves and cook and prepare dishes based on their level. After a period of time, the meal is prepared and must be placed onto an empty countertop by the user, where it will represent a set number of servings. Should the player fail to use a cooked meal in time, the food will spoil (there are push notifications for this). Once food is dished up, customers will order any one of the available, prepared dishes, enjoy a meal, and be off.

As more customers eat, the popularity of the restaurant increases, but should they not find an available seat, they become agitated and leave, which dings the popularity. Of course, these are all mechanics that have been done before, but there are also new features. Cooking, for example, is slightly altered. Players now have three types of cooking appliances: a stove, oven, and grill, and each only cooking certain types of food. Additionally, though it’s a minor add, players must also perform moderate prep work after the dish is done cooking (e.g. salting it).

A more noticeable difference is that TeamLava opted to not go the “hire friends as workers” route. The player’s avatar (if one can even call it that) merely stands at the front door and every element of the running the business is done automatically. In fact, there are zero servers and zero cooks, a choice that may have been made to ease development.

With simple visuals, Restaurant Story can seems very bland looking, and while the decorative element to the game can garner some nice looking virtual spaces, the space is still very static. Other than the blocky customers that walk in and perform one or two animations, nothing really moves.

Restaurant Story makes up for its visual shortcomings with the familiar TeamLava social integration. Unlike most other social games, on all platforms, social interaction is not limited to just real friends. Players are able to visit any player that has the game with a simple tap. Upon visiting them, users can not only leave comments on their space’s wall, but leave up to three “tips” on any empty table they have.

Leaving tips has multiple benefits. For the person being tipped, there is the obvious fiscal benefit, but they will also receive small amounts of bonus experience. As for the player doing the tipping, they will improve their “Star Rating.” Like the previous Story games, this rating increases the chance of the player appearing higher in the community listing, allowing more random players to find and visit one’s restaurant.

Players can also invite their friends as neighbors, or even other random players once a Storm8 ID is made. It’s not terribly different then visiting the random players, but neighbors get twice as many tips, and can gift items such as “secret recipes.”

Restaurant Story also has a number of virtual goods that cost Gems, the virtual currency. Though this, in and of itself, is nothing special, TeamLava does sell a “Magic Box” that contains items and decorations that are unattainable in any other way. There are a number of Halloween-themed goods available at the moment as well.

A final mechanics worth noting is that players can take snapshots of their or others’ restaurants and either save them to their iDevice or post them to Facebook, via Facebook Connect.

Overall, Restaurant Story has the familiar mechanics of a Facebook business sim, but still manages to feel different due to significantly better social mechanics, although these offer nothing new beyond past games in TeamLava’s Story franchise. The concept appears to be working for TeamLava, as these free-to-play apps always appear to be quite popular.

Following the suspension of all LOLapps games and apps on Friday by Facebook, the issue of Facebook policy has once again caught the attention of the broader developer community. Some now feel uncertain of what their responsibilities are, how harshly they may be penalized for infractions, and, in some cases, exactly what the policy calls for.

Facebook has encountered similar problems before. The problem, in this case and others, is the accepted technical way of sending information on what a user is doing. Third party advertisers are able to use the link from a user’s last visited page, which contains a user ID that can then be correlated with other information the third party has on a user.

There’s much more to this issue, so we’ve delved into it more deeply today on Inside Facebook. Game and app developers may have another question, though: what are Facebook’s, and their own, legal rights and responsibilities when it comes to enforcement of policy?

We got Claude Stern, the co-chair of law firm Quinn Emanuel’s intellectual property practice, on the phone to help cover some of the issues. While Stern wouldn’t share the names of any clients opposing Facebook’s current policies, his firm lists prominent names including Google and Zynga as current or former clients — and of course, the firm was shown in the new film The Social Network, representing ConnectU.

Inside Social Games: What is at issue with Facebook’s policies and the sharing of user data?

Claude Stern: This is what I think is an issue. If one looks at the Facebook terms of service, one will note that there are a variety of policies and sub-policies, that are not necessarily consistent with policies they’ve promulgated to developers or users. Put another way, it’s not quite clear that Facebook is clearly identifying what it believes is its information, and what is the information of others.

If one looks at the Facebook terms of service in relation to users, they seem to say that the user owns the information they place on their page. By the same token, if one looks on the terms of service of the developers page, those various provisions also seem to give the application developer the right to transfer, or the right to use, certain customer information with the approval of the customer.

But there is an area where it seems fair to say that I think there is widespread disagreement as to whether Facebook has the right to claim it owns certain information in regards to user data. On the one hand Facebook seems to be saying it has the right to determine whether or not user data is used or disposed of, even if the user believes otherwise.

ISG: So what do you see Facebook doing in response to privacy concerns? What should it do?

CS: I think Facebook is doing whatever it can, lawfully or not, to try to control the media. Not you the media, but its own media, and the social network. It seems, from looking at the terms and provisions that it tries to impose on both users and developers, that it is laying claim to data that the law may not otherwise give them a right to.

According to Facebook, the information on a user’s page belongs to a user. Presumably a user has the right to tell application developers they can use the data.

I think what has to be made clear is what people’s interests are. It’s not clear what Facebook’s interest is. Are they simply trying to keep control of the social network and media, and hold onto data that they’re otherwise not entitled to? Or is Facebook worried they might be held liable by privacy laws, and thus doing things that they they think are in their best interest, but are considered abusive by others?

ISG: What would be your solution to the problem?

CS:  In an ideal world, there’d be a conference where everyone could try to hash out what’s best for everyone. What the user wants is the right to control their own data…

ISG: There seem to be a number of opposing forces pushing at Facebook. How should they reconcile those things?

CS: Although it’s true that Facebook pushes out the data to people, that same data can be obtained in a variety of ways. One of the questions is, it seems to me that if the user has approved the use of identity, I don’t know why it’s bad for it to be used.

I think they should conform the policy to reality.

In the details of its ordering and the specific apps shown, this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users is much like last week’s list. The difference is that the week delivered about 50 percent more growth on average than the week before:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	ESPNU College Town	2,497,395	+1,248,151	+100%
2.	It Girl	4,877,026	+997,417	+26%
3.	Millionaire City	10,848,865	+970,004	+10%
4.	Crime City	1,050,548	+595,369	+131%
5.	Warstorm	1,685,638	+536,188	+47%
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,254,411	+524,479	+1%
7.	Car Town	5,769,125	+452,127	+9%
8.	MMA Pro Fighter	4,431,466	+380,414	+9%
9.	Bingo Island 2	905,686	+353,298	+64%
10.	BRAAAINS	440,121	+332,288	+308%
11.	Backyard Monsters	2,678,033	+300,989	+13%
12.	Cupcake Corner	1,129,380	+266,554	+31%
13.	Mall World	4,885,562	+262,445	+6%
14.	Madden NFL Superstars	2,242,776	+241,015	+12%
15.	Mall Dreams	1,258,408	+239,131	+23%
16.	Mafia Wars Game	21,901,887	+233,146	+1%
17.	Wheel Of Fortune	534,651	+208,066	+64%
18.	Monster World	4,039,030	+207,186	+5%
19.	Instant Jam	233,002	+193,028	+483%
20.	Coffee Bar	320,540	+192,739	+151%

ESPNU College Town, It Girl and Millionaire City are in much the same position they held before. Of course, the first two are new games, by Playdom and CrowdStar respectively, so every day they can extend their fast growth is a bonus to their long-term survival. Millionaire City, a comparatively older Digital Chocolate game, is becoming something of an anomaly, accelerating even as it passes 10 million MAU.

Crime City, by Funzio, blew past the million MAU mark this morning. This new graphical version of a standard Facebook RPG appears to have piqued user interest. Of course, while at first Crime City seems like an obvious idea — why didn’t anyone else think of making graphics-based mafia games? — there’s also more to the title, including a Zynga-esque mashup of collection and city-building mechanics alongside missions.

Speaking of Zynga, the card game Warstorm is performing quite respectably. A steep decline in the percentage of MAU returning as daily actives suggest that Zynga is fueling the growth with ad dollars, but the game still has a unique draw that may keep enough players around to make the bet profitable. Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker also comes in after Warstorm.

Car Town, like Crime City, is from a small developer. This game has reached the heights that a title like Crime City, or for that matter Bingo Island 2, BRAAAINS or one of the other small developer titles, should aspire to: millions of MAU without a well-known name or huge cash reserves to spend on ads.

Mobilitz is launching a new Facebook title, Heaven’s Diner, this week with a location-based iPhone version coming soon. Though the official title had not yet launched at the time we reviewed the game, we got a chance to take an early look at the ready-to-launch title.

Despite the name, this is not another Restaurant City or business sim of any sort. Instead, it’s a casual, time management game with a restaurant theme and the social elements.  Heaven’s Diner is a little on the easy side, at least initially, but provides a nice change of pace from the usual games we see. Still, some of the play elements are unclear and the play itself can feel repetitive.

Though Heaven’s Diner is technically not a business sim, you are still in charge of running a restaurant. However, you are running it up in heaven amongst all the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. The game has a pre-ordained layout and you serve the various deities and cherubs that fly through the door.

The rules are pretty simple. You’re given a menu of “Earth” foods from all over the globe and must select four items to serve. There is, apparently, a bonus to picking “popular” food. However, what is “popular” is not clearly stated. Through a bit of trial an error, we learned that sweets get a very high rating (at least in the first level – Athena). Ratings don’t appear to affect the game much, aside from a report card pop-up, but higher ratings do earn some bonus coin.

Once you select four platters, angels will begin visiting the space. There are four seats available and each angel will have a thought bubble displaying what  they wish to eat. You can then queue up three dishes and serve them by clicking on the thought bubble. A set of  hearts represent the amount of time left to serve the angel what he wants.

The longer the angel waits, or whenever you serve an incorrect dish, the hearts decrease until the angel leaves. Once patrons are finished, you must collect their pay before the hearts deplete. The process repeats itself for 60 seconds. The idea is to serve as many customers as possible within the time limit.

If this sounds easy, that’s because it is. However, as the game progresses, it does get a little bit more challenging — just not very quickly. Eventually, newer, pickier angels will appear. They require dishes with special toppings such as salt, honey or tomato. These characters pay more per serving, but obviously their preferences require extra time to manage. Once a certain number of patrons are served, the god or goddess of that level will appear. These characters pay hefty sums, but will only wait a few seconds and demand a number of toppings, forcing you to cancel queues of food for angels to try and satisfy the deity first.

Even with this progression, the game is very easy. It may get more challenging in later restaurants (e.g. Poseidon), but getting there takes a great deal of time and you must play the same level over and over again. And despite the ease of core play, there are other elements that are not well explained.

For instance, you can add your own unique dishes. This is an interesting mechanic that allows you to upload photographs (from their PC or Facebook) of your own meals, name them, describe them, and then share them with friends. These are also usable in the game to serve to patrons, but there doesn’t appear to be a benefit for creating your own dishes — other than satisfying creative urges and showing off your creations to friends. We thought there might be more points or currency for adding dishes, but through more trial and error, we have not seen any tangible benefit.

At the time of review, the game hadn’t officially launched, so such issues might be fixed. But, most likely, improvements will happen post launch; as with most social games.

As for social elements, they are a little difficult to comment on –  this is an early look, so very few people have access. In fact, the invite buttons are currently disabled. But, after some poking about it appears that you will be able to visit friend’s diners, comment on their original food dishes, send messages, and view friend’s game profiles.

There is a decorative element to Heaven’s Diner as well. It’s not as full-fledged as other virtual space oriented apps. You cannot place items wherever you desire. However, as you level up, you can upgrade items with nicer similar items. These upgrades play more than just an aesthetic role, they improve the star rating of you restaurant, thus attracting higher paying characters.

Overall, Heaven’s Diner is a nice change of pace, but in its current form suffers from a lack of instruction. Beyond this, the game play is extremely easy and becomes a bit repetitive. The social mechanics aren’t particularly engaging and adding your own original dishes, while potentially interesting, feels somewhat superfluous to the overall game. Still, as we’ve seen in other games, these issues may be corrected by the time of the full release.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Facebook— tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, October 11th, 2010

• Quiz Apps Take Over Our Weekly List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU Again
• Causes Launches Charitable Giving Gift Card
• Now Available: The Facebook Marketing Bible October 2010 Edition
• Facebook Groups API: Details and Potential
• Facebook, Zynga Add Fees to Stock Sales, as Early Employees Consider Sale Options
• Facebook Updates New Groups Interface

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

• Kontagent’s Social Analytics Suite V2.0 includes Event Tracking and Funnels
• Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Turkey, The Simpsons, Eminem and Coca-Cola
• New Official Facebook Stats Show More Sharing Per User
• New Facebook Security Features: One-Time Passwords, Security Info
• Sometrics’s Game Coins Can Now Be Exchanged for Facebook Credits, Too

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

• I/O Ventures Demo Day Startups Show Off Facebook Integrations
• Old Media Lives on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: 6waves, Mindgames, & More
• Facebook Instant Personalization Comes to Bing Web and People Search
• Facebook Opens Credits to More Developer, Shares New Statistics
• Bing Integration Points to Facebook’s Ambitions Beyond Search
• New Credits Partner PlaySpan Will Bring 20 More Payment Options to Facebook

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

• Design then Buy Your Dream Bracelet with Pandora’s Facebook App
• Involver Raises $8 Million Third Round to Expand Facebook, Social Media Marketing Services
• Browse Your Facebook News Feed and Phonebook Through Skype 5.0
• Facebook Careers: Vietnam Growth and Financial Planning
• Facebook Updates Comments Social Plugin with Voting System
• 4Loot Offers an Inefficient Way to Earn Facebook Credits through Search

Friday, October 15th, 2010

• Business-Oriented Tools Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
• Farmers Insurance Partners with Zynga’s FarmVille, Protects Against Virtual Crop Withering
• As Source for Current Facebook Employees, Google Has Big Lead on Yahoo, Microsoft, Oracle
• Facebook Like Buttons Begin Appearing in Online Banner Ads
• Facebook Roundup: Photos, Chat, Video, HTML5, Eventbrite, Payments, Zuck, Saverin and Corona