Zynga Wants You To Build A Neighborhood With ‘CityVille Hometown’ iOS App

Zynga is launching its second mobile game in two weeks, and today is debuting its mobile version of its hit game CityVille, ‘CityVille Hometown.’ The game is debuting via a free iOS app in Canada in the coming week and will be globally rolled out in the next few weeks. And CityVille Hometown is first mobile game from Zynga that will be localized in French, Italian, German and Spanish.

While the strategy and mechanics of the game is similar to its Web cousin, CityVille Hometown focuses on building small towns and villages instead of building a booming metropolis.

Justin Cinicolo, General Manager of Mobility for Zynga, explained to us that instead of creating cities, players will look to create a bustling town, invite friends and in-game characters to be neighbors, and build out their communities.

Players will fist be greeted by characters Bert and his mother Gilda who welcome and show them the basics of building a community. Kate, the resident community manager, will help players navigate their new hometown so they can begin to build, decorate, and for the first time and choose and name the citizens who will help them complete quests. The more players interact with the characters in their town, the more they will learn about their stories and help them achieve their own goals.

And players can purchase virtual goods to help build their homes and neighborhoods, such as actual homes, businesses, decorations, and coins.

So where’s the social component? CityVille Hometown can also access their Facebook friends who play CityVille and can swap resources and energy and send and receive special limited edition virtual items as rewards. Yep, that’s it. Whereas the web version of CityVille was Zynga’s most “social game yet,” the mobile version doesn’t appear to be quite as social.

One of the reasons why Zynga deviated from the metropolis angle for CityVille Hometown is because of the form factor of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Cinicolo tells me that they wanted to make the space more meaningful for a smaller device and smaller screen, and the design of buildings didn’t fit as well as building a home.

He says that lessons learned in taking FarmVille mobile were a contributing factor in figuring out how to optimize a game title for a mobile device. He adds that there are no set plans to expand CityVille Hometown to Android phones.

As for what type of player the game will engage, Cinicolo says Zynga is aiming for CityVille hometown to appeal to a broad audience, both in terms of age and gender. He compares the characters in the game to the feel of Saturday morning cartoons.

Zynga continues to churn out hits when it comes to its Facebook games. FarmVille was a big hit, CityVille became even bigger and the gaming giant’s newest game Empires & Allies is projected to surpass the monthly usage of CityVille and FarmVille.

But in comparison to the pace of web games, the company has been slower to create hits on mobile devices, even though mobile has been a focus for the company for some time. But things could be changing. Hanging With Friends hit the no. 1 spot in the Apple App Store across 3 charts—Top Free, Top Paid and Top Grossing. FarmVille has also done fairly well on the App Store. And with the massive popularity of CityVille’s Facebook game, CityVille Hometown could be a win as well.

CityVille currently has 90.5 million monthly active users on Facebook, so it should be interesting to see if Zynga can create the same sort of powerful engagement with the mobile version.

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Mr. Atari Wants To Bring The Video Arcade Into The Classroom (TCTV)

with Nolan Bushnell, founder of
Atari, Chuck E. Cheese
and now Speed to Learn.
Tell us what Speed to Learn is.
What are you trying to do there?


Speed to Learn is aimed
at changing the
way kids learn, both in and out of school.
And we believe that we
can speed their process
of learning the core
curriculum up to three
times faster.
And we will prove that
in the next few years.


You're bringing game mechanics to learning?


We're bringing game mechanics and some
things about game exercise.
Also about a certain
way of dealing with recursive adaptation.
And all those things
together really make a very efficient package.


Are you creating video games for students?


Yes.


Are you bringing the arcade into the classroom?
Yes.


How?


Well, we have a,
a game system which
teaches while you're playing
a game like Dance Dance Revolution.
Think Dance Dance Revolution meets step aerobics meets drilling practice.


So instead of learning how to
dance, you could be learning
math skills, you can learn.


Math skills, you can
learn you know, language vocabulary,
you can learn a whole bunch
of things and your retention
goes up massively when you do it that way.


It's it's kind of like
you're on a treadmill or some
kind of, some kind of system where you're actually moving around?


Yeah, I mean, what
you have to do is you have to get your heart rate up.
Once you get your heart rate
up, there's a whole bunch of
wonderful things happen in
terms of retention as well
as mental capacity.


So are you building one platform that can support many games?
Or is each of these
going to be the equivalent of, say,
Pong versus Pac Man
versus...

Well, it's all
on a basic PC platform.
All of these other things
just plug into a USB port.
So it's one platform, but
the games will be slightly different based
on the physical plan.


But you're not sitting down at a screen, you're standing up and being active.


Absolutely.


Are you using any kind of motion capture like Kinect?


Yes.


What else?


I'll have to kill you if I told you.


OK thanks, Nolan, can't wait to see it.

Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese, wants to bring the video arcade into the classroom. His latest startup is called Speed To Learn, and very little is known about it. But he was just on a panel I moderated at the Venture Capital in Education Summit in New York City, where he revealed a little more of his game plan. I caught him on video after the panel (watch above).

Essentially, Speed To Learn, which doesn’t even have a website yet, is a new education startup which wants to bring video games into the classroom. Like, real, arcade-style video games. “Think Dance Dance Revolution meets step aerobics” meets education software. On the panel he talked about treadmills with screens attached where kids learn in a very active way. I joked that he was trying to make up for creating a generation of kids who sat in front of the TV playing video games.

But Speed To Learn is about making learning fun by bringing game mechanics to the classroom. Kids learn better when they are active and have better retention. “You have to get the heart rate up,” says Bushnell. The game system will include adaptive learning algorithms so that it helps students learn better over time. Bushnell’s goal is to help students learn three times faster, an arbitrary number that he pulled out of the air, but it’s good to have stretch goals.

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