In a dramatic change from its past games like Happy Aquarium and It Girl, developer Crowdstar is now targeting a different demographic on Facebook with hardcore strategy-combat game, Wasteland Empires. The title is currently in open alpha.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Wasteland Empires currently has 150,000 monthly active users and 30,000 daily active users.

Like other Facebook strategy games aimed at the “hardcore” player, Wasteland Empires puts players in the role of a leader responsible for building structures that produce units, which can then be led into battle against other players and non-playable character factions. Building structures and creating units is dependent on resource gathering — some which can be collected from certain structures like farms, and some of which the player finds by scavenging ruins or attacking other settlements. Special items like rope or metal are also required to complete structures, which is where Wasteland Empires works in its monetizaiton, social features, and impetus for attacking other players, as these are the only ways to get special items.

Currently, combat in the game is asynchronous — and Crowdstar means to keep it that way as Facebook is a naturally asynchronous platform. Players can view a map on which several other players’ settlements are visible, and mouse over each to see a quick snapshot of that settlement’s capabilities — including a difficulty ranking for how hard it will be to defeat that settlement. Once confirming the decision to attack, the player is taken to the opponent’s settlement and can choose which of their units to send in by class type (scouts, clubbers, etc.). While in combat, the player can control up to six different unit types at once, sending each type to different places in the settlement for an element of strategy. The only defenses currently live in the game are weapons towers constructed by the opponent.

While in combat, a reputation scale indicates the player’s progress. The scale shows an orange bar to the left of a skull icon and an empty bar to the right of it — the player depletes that orange bar as they destroy opponent structures. Once the orange has run all the way down to the skull icon, they player is deemed as winning the battle and a blue bar begins to build to the right of the skull. Attacks end when all structures are destroyed, when a timer expires, or when the player runs out of units. A percentage of resources is then awarded to the player, along with special items. If a player is attacking an equally matched or higher level player, the skull icon on the scale is moved more toward the middle or far left of the scale, meaning that the player can achieve victory more quickly. If the player is attacking a lower level character, the “win” point moves farther to the right, meaning the player will have to destroy almost all structures in a settlement to achieve a win.

The things that makes Wasteland Empires stand out are the setting — a post apocalyptic Earth — and a colonist-to-combat-unit ratio restriction that the player must balance while building structures and training units. The player can only have 50% of its population earmarked for combat units; the rest, the player can use to clear the land around the settlement and to build new structures. There is also a tech tree that the player can advance by building certain structures or researching different technologies, but this is something we’ve seen in other strategy games on Facebook.

User acquisition is going to be a challenge for Wasteland Empires. Given Crowdstar’s current lineup of women-oriented games, it’s almost impossible to leverage cross promotion of the developer’s 11.8 million MAU and 1 million DAU user base. The developer tells us it will be actively recruiting users from different demographics, although it declined to name the acquisition companies with which Crowdstar works. We do know that Crowdstar is a client of Facebook ad service Nanigans.

Wasteland Empires monetizes through the sale of a premium currency, gold, which is mainly used for speeding up building construction. Interestingly, players can also earn gold by leveling up in addition to purchasing batches of it with Facebook Credits. Social features are currently limited to gifting special resources. Wasteland Empires does not allow players to attack friends and there is no alliance or chat feature in place.

Crowdstar is officially revealing Wasteland Empires today by adding its brand to the existing alpha product on Facebook. You can follow the game’s progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Played in halls and senior centers around the U.S., bingo is one of the country’s most popular games of chance. In its latest Facebook incarnation, Bingo Bash, the game is infused with items to collect and power-ups that help players score higher. Developed by The Vegas Team, the title has been live since June of this year, showing its most significant uptake in users beginning at the end of September.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Bingo Bash currently has 80,000 monthly active users and 30,000 daily active users.

On a basic level, Bingo Bash is a faithful recreation of the game of bingo. In it, players have cards with random numbers from 1 to 75 arranged in a 5×5 grid. Numbers are then drawn at random and players mark them out on the card, if there’s a match. If the player completes a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they click the “Bingo” button and win. In this variation, up to 100 players can participate in an instance simultaneously and there are 20 possible bingos. If all 20 are claimed, the game ends, adding an element of urgency to matching numbers.

Bingo chips must be spent to play. Players purchase their bingo cards using chips and can play up to four cards in a game, if they’re skilled enough. Players gain experience points for each number they match, which fills a power-up meter. Once activated, it rewards players with a random bonus, such as gems, double experience points, instant bingo, or a bigger payout. These are randomly overlaid on the number grid and are awarded if players match the number they land on. Coins are added to the player’s tally automatically. Gems, which come in different colors, are added up at the end of the game and can be combined to earn more coins and bingo chips.

Like other bingo games we’ve seen on Facebook, each match is set against backdrops inspired by famous locations around the world, such as ancient Egypt. Each area is connected to a collection of 12 items which can be purchased using the player’s winnings. When all are collected, a prize of more coins and chips is unlocked. Gaining experience points levels players up, earning them more coins and chips, while also working towards unlocking new locales. Players are rewarded for returning each day, and can earn achievements for playing.

In terms of social features, the game is based on real-time multiplayer for up to 100 players per instance. This is accompanied by a real-time leaderboard displaying the top three players prominently. Players compete for a pool of 20 bingos per game and can chat in real-time while it’s in progress and in-between games. The title also features friend invites, with 1,000 coins rewarded for every friend that joins. Players can also send and receive gifts, brag about their performance via viral channels, and share winnings with friends if they wish.

Bingo Bash is monetized by players purchasing bingo chips and coins using Facebook Credits. Chips are used for buying cards and power-ups, while coins can be put towards the purchase of items. Chips can be converted into coins should the player decide to.

The game was just recently updated to introduce rewards upon leveling up. The Vegas team continues to deploy fixes based on player feedback, such as making the color of the dauber used to mark winning numbers more pronounced. It has been quite active in player community on the game’s Wall overall.

You can follow Bingo Bash’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Recently picked up by 6waves Lolapps, Zombie Island from Vizor Interactive is a Facebook farm simulation that simulates the deceased. Well, actually, the re-animated deceased. Yes: it’s about zombies. Zombies that live on an island and have jobs to do, just like anyone else. It’s a formula that’s proving quite popular, at least in this game’s case.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Zombie Island currently has 120,000 monthly active users and 20,000 daily active users.

Zombie Island is set on — wait for it — an island. This one is of limited land size, however, and there are distinct sections of it (“backyard,” “mountains”) that can be unlocked, for a price. Players shamble around as their zombie avatar, which can be dressed up and given a makeover using a small selection of free items, along with a more sizable for-pay assortment. The goal is, as with nearly all simulations of this ilk, to complete various quests and tasks. Doing so often requires resources, such as those needs to build a tomb early on. In this example, the player needs wood and stone. In order to get them, they must “wake up” zombie woodsmen and stone workers from their graves and put them on the job. This takes brains.

The number of brains the player has at their disposal dictates how many tasks their workers can be handling at any given time. There’s a maximum number of brains available, which is set by “renting” brains for a price, using “zombiebucks.” Rented brains come in different quantities and durations, such as two for two days, one for three days, and so on. Although the amount of work being done is limited by available brains, players can still spend coins — earned from completing even small tasks — to hire more zombies, so they can be at the ready.

As is expected from the genre, the game also lets players spend their earnings on decorations to personalize their islands. There are also a variety of recipes to find (like more items in the game, they unlock as players level up) and make. This is how players can obtain some of the game’s more rare items. Collections are also here, with the game bestowing ample rewards of coins, bucks and XP on players who complete them.

In addition to renting brains, players are able to “plant” their friends’ brains in the ground (up to two per day). This is one of the game’s more clever social features. It’s also possible for players to visit the islands of friends they’ve invited, once per week, to claim rewards. Like most titles of this type, there’s a persistent display of the player’s rank along with their friends’ at the bottom of the play area. Sending free gifts and sharing stories about the player’s successes via viral channels rounds out the social side of the title.

Zombie Island is monetized in a traditional fashion, with players buying zombiebucks and coins using Facebook Credits. Bucks are generally used to unlock items early before their usual level requirements are met, buy premium deco, speed up tasks, rent brains, and obtain power-ups, such as automated resource harvesting for up to 12 hours. Coins, the soft currency, can be used to buy all the staples of Zombie Island life.

According to posts made on the game’s Wall, developer Vizor Interactive is finished on a “Halloween Campaign” that will roll out by month’s end and transform the look of the game, making it even more Halloween-y, and adding new quests.

You can follow Zombie Island’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Hiring was up sharply this week in the social gaming space. According to data from LinkedIn and other sources, 10 companies hired 18 new employees. Once again Zynga lead the way with four new team members and one promotion. Playfish, Kabam and King.com all had two hires this week, but despite plenty of movement, there were no high profile or executive level hires to report.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please get in touch with us. Email us at: mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get your news into an upcoming post.

If you want to know who else is hiring, the Inside Network Job Board showcases current openings with the industry’s leading companies.

Digital Chocolate

• Javier Ferra Giménez,  Junior Game Designer – First up, Digital Chocolate returns to our listings with a single hire. Giménez was formerly a 3D animator, 3D artist and tool programmer at Cromosoma.

GameHouse

• Edwin van Iersel, Frontend Web Developer – A single hire puts GameHouse on our list. van Iersel comes from White B.V. where he was also a frontend web developer.

Gaia Interactive

• Mengling Chen, Sprite Art Contractor – There’s also one new face at Gaia Interactive this week. Chen comes from Research in Motion, where she was an intern project operations coordinator. 

Kabam

• Matthew Boyce, Player Experience Associate – Kabam brings aboard two new team members. Boyce was previously claims support specialist and accounts payable at Travelers.
• Tony Lee, Front End Developer, Mobile - Lee is also new to Kabam, coming from Disney Interactive Media Group, where he was a senior web developer.

King.com

• Damir Buco, Junior Game Designer – King.com also hired two new people this week. Buco comes to King.com from International Christian University.
• Rikard Elofsson, Programmer – Also joining is Elofsson, who was previously at Super Local Media, where he was system architect.

Nordeus

• Jan Lenhart, Software Development Engineer – Nordeus also registers change this week. First is Lenhart moves up from the position of intern at Nordeus.
• Jovana Avalić, Software Development Engineer - Avalić joins the Nordeus team this week, coming from Soneco where she was a software developer.

Playdom

• Carlianne Fenton, Junior Artist - Fenton comes from Gaia Online where she was a contract sprite artist.

Playfish

• Radek Majder, Development Director – Two hires at Playfish this week. Majder shuffles to the team from Electronic Arts, where he was also a development director
• Karina Margole, QA Test Engineer – Also new to Playfish is Margole who comes from Exient, where she was a QA technician.

Wooga

• Eevi Korhonen, Product Management Intern – A single hire for Wooga, who add Korhonen to the team. She was previously the development assistant at Denki.

Zynga

• Sanjay Mangla, Engineering Manager – A flurry of hires and activity this week at Zynga. First up is Mangla who was the senior development lead for Xbox Live at Microsoft.
• Michael Fan, Software Engineer – Also joining is Fan, who comes from Pacific Biosciences where he was also a software engineer.
• Ali Aman Jalbani, Sr. Software Engineer – Jalbani moves from YouSendIt where he was also a Sr. software engineer.
• Andrew Ushakov, Sr. Software Engineer – Ushakov makes the move from Yandex, where he was also a Sr. software engineer.
• Amit Gupta, Customer Service Lead – And finally Gupta, who was promoted from his customer service position at Zynga.

iWin, publisher of Facebook versions of popular game shows including 1 vs. 100, Family Feud, and Deal or No Deal, has added another to its lineup: the $100,000 Pyramid. This version of the TV show, which premiered in 1973, launched in beta on September 1.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, $100,000 Pyramid currently has 360,000 monthly active users and 90,000 daily active users.

Pyramid is a single-player game where players have to answer three rounds of six questions, each round following a specific theme. If they’re able to do that, they progress to the Winners Circle, which contains three additional questions, worth higher values. The questions are set up such that the answers are single words: people, places, or things. Players are given two clues as to what each word is, and are able to purchase an extra clue using Clue Coins. There’s a timer that counts down over the course of all six questions in a round, adding urgency to the player’s responses. The game also requires that players answer a minimum number of questions in the three main rounds correctly in order to enter the Winners Circle.

The cash that players win can be used to purchase items for over two dozen collections, each containing five items. The first item in each collection must be won by playing the game. Some of the items are priced at over $1 million in in-game cash. Playing the game itself costs one episode token; players are given five to begin with, and earn one additional episode every 12 hours. More episodes can be purchased, or earn by completing collections.

Social features of $100,000 Pyramid include friend invites, which earn players additional cash once accepted, and sharing when players level up via viral channels. The game also features a real-time leaderboard that compares players’ scores against their friends.$100,000 Pyramid is monetized in two ways. The first is through the use of Facebook Credits to purchase additional Clue Coins. These come in bundles costing 5, 10, 30, 50, and 100 Credits. The second way is by players purchasing extra episodes, also using Facebook Credits. They’re available in groups of three to 100 episode tokens, ranging from 20 to 400 Credits.

You can follow $100,000 Pyramid’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

It Girl developer Crowdstar announced a global aspiration today titled “Project Trident” that will spread the company’s top Facebook and mobile game franchises to international networks.

The first part of the project is It Girl and Top Girl’s migration to Asia via South Korean games portal operator NHN. The “Girl” franchise will start out in Japan on NHN’s affiliate there before in theory migrating to South Korea and China. NHN’s largest games portal, Hangame, claims to be the largest in South Korea with 24 million registered uses and 240,000 concurrent users at its peak traffic.

Meanwhile on Facebook and mobile in western markets, Crowdstar is preparing to augment its games library with eight new game launches before the end of Q4 — one of which is due to launch this weekend. Currently, the “Girl” franchise is Crowdstar’s leader at 3.3 million monthly active users and 280,000 daily active users on Facebook and over 4 million downloads of the mobile game. The developer says it expects its mobile revenues to account for half the company’s overall revenue this year.

According to the press release announcing Project Trident, the Girl franchise enjoys close to 8 million MAU and 1 million DAU across Facebook, mobile, and global. For Facebook’s part, It Girl has been in decline for the past two to three months across MAU and DAU — reflecting an almost 47% drop in DAU for the past 30 days alone. As for MAU, it was already in a gradual decline before Facebook changed its accounting practices for active users on October 14.

As social games grow and evolve on Facebook and other networks, we’re observing emerging gameplay trends and ideas in many of the more popular titles today.

The trouble with highlighting these individual components is that it tempts people to cry “clone” whenever one social game introduces a mode or a technique that closely resembles something another social game already tried. There’s also a compulsion to determine “who wore it better” whenever two or more social games replicate the same mechanic made popular by a third video game that isn’t even on the Facebook platform. We can’t really be blamed for these behaviors as there is no shortage of copycat games out there, even with the market being dominated primarily by original games.

On a fundamental level, however, certain ideas or design choices just make for a better overall experience no matter what game in which we see them first. As these components surface and are adopted on a large scale by major social games, it becomes a norm that players look for in each new wave of social game.

With that in mind, we turn our attention to the simple game mechanics and design choices that trending in the current generation of social games:

Mouse-over Item Pickups Instead of Click-Fests

As seen in: FrontierVille, Lucky Space
A year ago, item drops in social games were usually collected by the player actively clicking the item or by waiting for the game to automatically add the item to the player’s inventory. Some games incentivized the clicking behavior by adding a bonus bar that rewarded players with larger amounts of in-game currency for each item clicked in a certain amount of time. While engaging, the rapid-click activity could sometimes frustrate players if they accidentally clicked on something other than the item drop or if their computer was slow to register individual mouse clicks made in rapid succession. Now games are introducing a mechanic that automatically collects dropped items when the player mouses over the item — no click necessary. This creates a much smoother experience for games that rely on a harvest mechanic (which produces at least three item drops per action in the form of currency, experience points, and a in-game resource).

Deeper Matchmaking

As seen in: Tetris Battle, the upcoming Idle Worship
Games that pit players against one another in head-to-head challenges or combat used to arrange matches only within player friend groups or by completely random pairing. As the strategy genre evolved, developers began to arrange matches only within certain level limits — discouraging or totally disallowing higher level players to attack lower level players even if they were friends on Facebook. The next evolution in this process is true matchmaking, where a game sorts players not only by level range, but also by additional factors — like number of matches or tournaments won, gameplay style, or by which skill sets the player has unlocked or advanced within their game.

Leaderboards, They’re Not Just for Pac-Man Anymore

As seen in: Triple Town, Hero Generations, and pretty much everything with a score counter
Leaderboards came to Facebook hand-in-hand with arcade games where the entire point of the game is to achieve a high score for other players to see. Other games genres have begun adopting them, however, as a quick and easy way to make a solitary game feel social. Two genres in particular — puzzle and role-playing — have been especially active in introducing leaderboards, sometimes even marrying them to the traditional neighbors bar displayed along the bottom of the screen. The catch is here is in introducing a scoring system that reconciles various factors (how fast a player completes a puzzle or quest versus how many moves or items it took to complete the activity, etc.) into a single score that can be tracked by leaderboard.

High Quality Soundtracks

As heard in: Ravenskye City, Mafia Wars 2, the upcoming CastleVille
Remember when Facebook games didn’t even have music? Those days are very much done with developer investing larger amounts of money into crafting game soundtracks. Part of this is a quality arms race among developers — if Ravenskye City gets vocals, Mafia Wars 2 needs several rap songs, then CastleVille has to have a full orchestra and so on. Part of it is also a theme concern, because who wants to listen to heavy metal while playing a farm sim? Soundtracks, however, are also about reflecting the personal style of the developer; Lucky Space developer A Bit Lucky told us it went out of its way to create a soundtrack that the entire team felt it could listen to endlessly.

User-Generated Content, Where the Player Does the Work for You

As seen in: Heroes of Neverwinter, fashion games
Now that social games are capable of more advanced mechanics, developers are able to expose certain tool sets of their game to players and then turn around and incorporate what the player makes into the game. This creates a virtual economy of trade and reputation similar to what we see in the traditional video games industry among the modding communities. Though not as advanced as, say, LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation 3, the user-generated content in some games is sophisticated enough for developers to incentivize it with routine contests and virtual currency prizes or payouts for the most active players. This works to the developer’s advantage because players create and promote new content on their own, without much need for oversight from the developer (in contrast to player versus player-focused games that frequently need moderators to clamp down on griefing).

These are just a handful of the smaller-scale game mechanics and design choices we see trending among popular social games on the Facebook platform. Alas, we cannot break out the actual traffic impact each feature can or does have on social games before and after. Even without the numbers to back it up, however, it shouldn’t be a stretch to conclude that a better gameplay experience makes for a better game.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Lolapps, Sociable Labs, Games Cafe, Natural Motion Games, TinyCo, CrowdStar, Storm8, Acquinity Interactive and King.com.

• Support Engineer- Browser and Social Games
• Product Manager for Popular Social Gaming Company
• Sr. Game Engineer for a Popular Social Gaming Company

• Principal Software Engineer Social Commerce

• Game Programmer
• Social Game Designer

• Design Lead / Manager
• Lead Programmer
• Customer Acquisition Manager

• iPhone Developer
• C++ Game Engineer

• Mobile UI Artist
• Senior Game Developer – Flash

• Recruiter
• User Relations Associate

• Director of Operations – Online Marketing
• Account Executive – Online Marketing
• Marketing Coordinator – Online Marketing
• Sales Director – Online Marketing
• Senior Affiliate Manager – Online Marketing
• Senior Account Executive – Online Marketing

• PR Executive – King.com
• Consumer Research Executive – King.com
• Marketing Communications Executive – King.com

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Berlin-based social betting game developer Crowdpark has raised a $6 million second round of investment led by Europe’s Target Partners with participation from previous investor Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the developer’s total funding to $8 million.

Crowdpark made some ink earlier this year with Bet Tycoon (formerly titled “Crowdpark – Betting Game”), consistently landing in our top 20 emerging Facebook games category toward the beginning of the summer. The game allows players to place bets of virtual currency on a range of topics in popular culture (e.g. the outcome of sports games) or on customized private topics (e.g. “Is Jane from accounting dating John from the mail room?”). Players pay in Facebook Credits to receive a pool of virtual currency, which is then placed on bets. Players receive virtual currency whenever they win a bet; but per Facebook policy and many online gambling laws in various countries, this cannot be converted back into Facebook Credits.

As the actual process of the game isn’t very visual, Crowdpark included this infographic with the press release announcing the funding to illustrate the process:

Over the next couple of weeks and months, Crowdpark plans to update Bet Tycoon with content that makes it feel more like a traditional Facebook game — such as a player progression system and a storyline where the player is encouraged to become the ultimate betting tycoon.

Where Bet Tycoon really gets interesting is in the dynamics of bets in real time. Using Crowdpark’s forecasting algorithm, the game shifts the winnings and odds of a bet depending on how the actual event being bet on plays out. At any point during a football game, for example, a player could cash out before losing a bet completely to recoup some of their virtual currency.

It’s this piece of technology that investor Target Partners found especially compelling. Target partner Waldemar Jantz tells us that the company had never before invested in a social game — only in technology The combination of social game and betting (without actual gambling) was also a factor that convinced the firm to invest in Crowdpark. Earlybird Venture Capital is best known in the social games industry for backing Peak Games, a Facebook game publisher-developer that has the lead on Turkish, Middle Eastern and North African markets.

Going forward, Crowdpark’s Ingo Hinterding says the new round of funding will go toward hiring on staff and expanding into other platforms. The developer recently opened an office in San Francisco and plans to release a new game for mobile platforms centered on sports betting in the next three months. At some point after that, Crowdpark hopes to release a third product that leverages dual-screen players that like to watch an event on one screen (say, a TV) while monitoring their bets on another (like an iPad). Hinterding also says Google+ may be a possible platform for the developer, “once we’ve seen the numbers.”

Crowdpark is also launching a Social Betting Index on its own site to show the world what people are betting on. According to Hinterding, this information cannot yet be broken out by region or demographic, but this could be a feature added to the index at a later date.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Bet Tycoon currently enjoys 480,000 monthly active users and 20,000 daily active users.

A new “Top 50 Friends” option in Friend Invite menus on Facebook streamlines the game requests process and could produce higher retention.

As spotted in the newly-launched Ravenskye City, the Invite Friends menu now displays a “Select Top 50 Friends” box that automatically selects the first 50 names that appear on the Friends list (which is organized alphabetically). This box appears both for the general Friends filter and for any additional filters the developer has created (such as Ravenwood Fair Friends) filter. If a player goes through their list to manually select friends, the number in the Top Friends filter decreases accordingly. This means that at any time, the player can add to the list of friends they’ve already selected with remaining invites.

The Friend Request portion of a social game is crucial to viral growth because it exposes new games to potentially receptive users, but it can be harmful to retention. For example, a player faced with an unsorted list of friends might opt out of sending Requests for fear of annoying a non-gamer friend. Players also may be frustrated by having to click individual boxes next to friend names repeatedly until they hit the maximum invite limit (which now appears to be 50 whereas a few months ago it was fixed at 30 for most social games). Both examples could hurt retention because it creates friction around the Request process — which most games rely on not only for recruiting new users but also for gifting systems.

This “top 50″ option in the Requests list will go a long way toward eliminating both concerns — particularly if developers craft better filters that return only those friends that have a history of exchanging gifts with the player. In its present state, inviting your top 50 friends as organized alphabetically isn’t very useful as there are no guarantees that those friends even play games on Facebook.

UPDATE: We reached out to Facebook and 6waves Lolapps for more information on how this tool works. From what we gather, the developer created the tool using Frictionless Requests and a Facebook spokeswoman confirms that it is policy-compliant:

“When using pre-selected IDs for frictionless sends, the users selected must already be interacting together in the game, or the user must have selected them manually (using an in game selector.)”