A few days ago, we covered Weeby.co, a startup with a special focus on developing software that can span multiple messaging apps. Today, that same company has launched its very first game for Tango: Bubble Pang. This is also the company’s second integration into a messaging app this year (following Doki for Kik Messenger) and the first of a “dozen or more games” that the company plans to launch this summer.
Weeby.co describes Bubble Pang for Tango as a “beautiful bubble shooter, a mobile gaming stalwart and spiritual descendant of popular old desktop games like Snood, combined with a smooth social leaderboard UI flow.” The game is face-paced and is targeted at the casual gaming audience. It also serves as a demonstration on what Weeby.co’s unique development technology can do.
Players engage with their Tango friends, as they compete for top spot on the leaderboard each week, and motivate their friends by sending extra lives and gloating about their new high scores. Implementing those popular socially driven retention features took the tiny Weeby.co studio’s single game engineer exactly zero time and yielded impressive metrics.
“These features depend heavily on player-to-player engagement which is Weeby.co’s focus”
“The secret to our success is the very best social re-engagement, retention, and monetization mechanics in the industry, polished and honed over two years and now productized as the Weeby.co SDK,” explains Weeby.co CEO Michael Carter. “These features depend heavily on player-to-player engagement which is Weeby.co’s focus.”
The CEO further explains: “We didn’t just make a game with great social flows, we built an entire social game template with dozens of configurable modules. These are super-polished UIs, like gifts, challenges, social progression maps, messaging, weekly tournaments, alliances — any feature that consistently drives users back to the game to re-engage their friends.”
Carter pointed out that the retention rate of Bubble Pang is at a high 60-70% rate after the first day. It’s possible that other developers who wish to utilize Weeby.co’s SDK will see similar results.
The Weeby.co SDK provides the UI, server and messenger integration for market-leading social and free-to-play game mechanics. The launch version also includes in-app currency modules for power-up purchases and daily bonuses. Including these required nothing more than a quickly iterated design choice and an artist using powerful dev tools to customize the UI and animations. As developers build a game they just need to choose which SDK Template, Leaderboard (as seen in Flappy Birds), Progression Map (shown in Candy Crush), or Turn-Based (like Words With Friends).
developers can choose from three SDK Templates, including Leaderboard, Progression Map, or Turn-Based
Since the SDK is directed exclusively toward messaging apps, Tango is a natural partner for the startup, since it has an established and successful gaming platform that launched last year with “Road Riot for Tango”.
“The toughest aspects of building a game are retention and monetization, two metrics that depend heavily on player-to-player engagement which is both Tango and Weeby.co’s focus,” said Richard Rabbat, VP of Advertising and Platform for Tango. “We’re pleased to work with Weeby.co’s launch of Bubble Pang. Weeby.co represents a new generation of mobile game developers that are very innovative and embracing messaging apps as a strategy to increase visibility and engagement through the Tango platform.”
Of course, as already mentioned in our previous coverage of Weeby.co, the tech doesn’t just stop at Tango, but goes across the different messaging platforms, including Kik, LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat.
Bubble Pang for Tango is available for free on iTunes and Google Play.