TinyCo Has a Cross-Platform Development Trick up Its Sleeve: The Griffin Engine
When I wrote about Tiny Village, a prehistoric city building game from Andreessen Horowitz-backed TinyCo a few weeks ago, the game’s producers briefly mentioned something they had built that would allow them to quickly deploy the game to both Android and iOS.
When I asked for more, they got a little cagey about it. But now it looks like the San Francisco-based developer is being more public about its underlying technology.
TinyCo says it has built a mobile-social gaming engine called Griffin, that allows them to ship games simultaneously to Android and iOS without requiring double the engineering staff.
Based on C++, it took more than six months to build. It supports feature and content parity for Android and iOS and automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and resolutions.
In going public about the gaming engine, TinyCo is positioning itself to license Griffin out to partners, which might lay the groundwork for an additional revenue stream beyond first-party games.
Of course, many companies have made this “Write Once, Run Anywhere” promise including Appcelerator, Corona, Sibblingz and Phonegap, whose maker was acquired by Adobe. Then, of course, there’s Facebook, which is trying to nudge developers toward HTML5. Perhaps the most notable example of a game developer simultaneously offering cross-platform technology is DeNA’s ngmoco:) which built ngCore, a framework that it says lets developers write a game in JavaScript and then publish it to multiple platforms.
We haven’t seen any single solution take a distant lead over technologies from other companies, however. Since TinyCo is just publicly announcing this now, we’ll take a closer look at it in the coming weeks. TinyCo has $18 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
December 9th, 2011 at 12:43 am
This will be funny to watch. TinyCo can’t even maintain a game consistently in the Top 50. And now they’re going to license their engine? Unreal and Unity are dominating this market. Good luck, TinyCo – you’re going to need it.
December 9th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
Lillian — There’s a lot more involved than maintaining a game in the top 50. Unlike many other devs, TinyCo is not a one-trick-pony. Those other guys must do what you mentioned or they’re screwed.
December 12th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Not sure what you mean Ed. TinyCo didn’t raise $18mm to develop an engine. That capital was raised on the promise of dominating the mobile social space. If they are pivoting/diversifying, then more power to them. But their core business is developing games and they aren’t maintaining that.
December 20th, 2011 at 10:23 am
[...] seven spots to the #36 position on the iPad top grossing charts. Developed with TinyCo’s new C++ based Griffin Engine, the game is a city building game with a prehistoric theme. Players can trade resources with other [...]
August 13th, 2012 at 9:13 am
[...] Ali tells us that although TinyCo is still in the process of finalizing its new office space, the company already has its first three Vancouver employees on board. Over the next six months, the company plans to increase headcount at TinyCo Vancouver to 60 people, including programmers, artists, engineers, data analysts, QA staff and product managers. The team will be building games for both iOS and Android using TinyCo’s cross-platform Griffin engine. [...]