Digital Chocolate launches Island God on Facebook - Not another Millionaire City clone!

We're three for three this week, in terms of new games being released by Digital Chocolate, creators of Millionaire City. Monday brought us Hollywood City, yesterday saw the launch of Vegas City, and today, we finally have something totally different (at least from the above), in the form of Island God.

Meet us behind the break for full details about this truly new game in the developer's lineup.

The story of Island God is a fairly simple one. On an island far away from your own, a group of peaceful villagers lived in prosperity. During a big party, however, a fire breaks out on their island, ruining their way of life. Many islanders fled their home altogether, and have come to call your island home. It's now up to you to rebuild their society and become their Island God.

The gameplay sees you building various structures (quarries, huts, and the like) which you can then assign individual workers to use. That is, regardless of how many structures you may have on your island, you will only be able to concurrently use (and therefore earn profits and experience points from) the same amount of buildings as you have citizens. Luckily, adding various Bungalows to your island allows you to earn more citizens.

Each item, whether it be a quarry, woodcutter's stump, religious totem or otherwise, can be scheduled to earn money over a varying amount of time. This is the main "contract" portion of the game, allowing you to assign your citizens to a particular structure from anywhere from 3 minutes to 2 days at a time. Of course, the longer your citizens stays, the more rewards you'll earn in the end.

Stones, wood planks, and vials all come into play when you want to add new structures to your island, as you'll need wood to build homes, and so on. You'll also need to purchase these buildings with coins, making the title a bit like FrontierVille, in that you have to worry about not only how many coins you have in your virtual pocketbook, but also how much wood you have as well. There is also a quest system, that like seen in FrontierVille, that asks you to perform certain tasks, purchase certain items, and more, all with the reward of more coins or experience points.

In addition, Island God contains an energy system, but instead of requiring energy to perform basic gameplay actions, here, you're allowed to spend the energy performing "Godly" tasks. These tasks can be lighting torches to bring fire to the island, or even blessing or smiting your villagers so that they'll instantly complete the job they are currently working on. It's in this that the game starts to take on a personality of its own.

Depending on whether or not you perform good, pure, blessing actions, or evil, smiting actions, your island will change in appearance as a response. You can also affect the growth and technological advancement of your island by researching tools, expansions and such from the Research Menu.

Some of the game's features are locked until you reach at least level 5, but we're guessing that the gameplay here is original enough to keep most players playing for that long (or longer). If you're interested in becoming an Island God, you can do so by heading over to the game's official page on Facebook.

Unseating FarmVille: Have social games seen better days?

We reported earlier this week that FarmVille has been ousted as the top Facebook application, with the Phrases application coming out on top as of this week. For those of us who work with these games day after day, we know that FarmVille falling to 54 million players from 84 million players isn't the end of the world. An article posted today in PC World claims that this is a sign of general social gaming woes:

    It's like Zynga is scrambling to add more sources of air to a deflating bubble. The fact that a random quiz app could unseat Farmville from its top spot, even temporarily, shows that social games have seen better days.

    [Source: PCWorld]

We think that this article was a bit sensational and overblowing the situation. Many articles on the web talk about social games as if there is only one game (FarmVille) or only one company (Zynga) who are playing a part in the massively popular gaming trend. What these articles fail to mention is that smaller developers are now showing huge successes, and that there are many more companies out there making social games. There are currently 10 social game developers with over 10 million monthly active users across their games. Another 12 with over 5 million MAU. And over 75 other lesser-known social game developers who have games with over 1 million players combined. This is no easy feat, and nothing to sneeze at.

Social games are diversifying. The days of Zynga not only ruling the roost but also being the only major player are dead. There are up-and-coming developers such as Digital Chocolate that are pumping out high quality games at an unbelievable pace. Massive brands such as Google (who purchased Slide), EA (who purchased Playfish), and Disney (who purchased Playdom) are coming in and putting existing IP and familiar faces into new and existing games.

Social games aren't dying, by any means. The loss in numbers of FarmVille is an indicator of the game's age and lifecycle, and the vast number of new games by new companies that are being released weekly. It's never looked better for social game players, nor social game developers. Using FarmVIlle as an indicator of social game health as a whole is a rookie mistake that many journalists are making, but at Games.com - The Blog, we know better because we are completely immersed in Facebook games.