Mr.Farmville

King.com’s Bubble Saga landed on our top 20 lists for games growing by monthly active users and daily active users only in the last two weeks with 2.6 million MAU and 607,000 DAU to date. No small feat, considering that the game’s only been in open beta for about three weeks.

In Bubble Saga, players take the “role” of a princess out to save her prince by traveling across a galaxy of planets by completing a Snood-style match game. Players control a cannon that fires colored bubbles at a cluster of multi-colored bubbles, trying to match at least three of the same color to clear them from the cluster. Players have a set number of projectile bubbles per level and can only cycle between the color bubble in the cannon and the next projectile bubble queued for the cannon. Each planet is divided into multiple levels, each of which being a different geometric arrangement of bubbles.

The main gameplay challenge comes from a physics perspective where the cluster rotates when shot at, presenting the player with different targets of bubble. The player needs to use strategy to shift the cluster in ways that will present their limited projectiles the maximum range of targets. Each level has a set minimum score requirement that the user must clear to pass the level and two additional score requirements for the maximum 3-star rating on the level. Players that fail the level either by missing the minimum score mark, running out of bubbles, or causing a bubble attached to the cluster to hit the wall around the puzzle lose a life. Lives can be regenerated over time, gifted by friends, or bought.

Bubble Saga monetizes through the sale of its single in-game currency, Coins. The Coins can be spent on boosts that provide gameplay advantages, like a Rainbow Bubble that will trigger a match for any color of bubble it’s shot at. Interestingly, players must first earn boosts before they become available for purchase and the only way to do that is to achieve a minimum star score across all levels on a single planet to unlock the hidden boost at the planet’s core. Bubble Saga currently accepts credit card, PayPal, mobile payments, and Facebook Credits in addition to offer wall promotions.

At time of press, we weren’t able to contact the developer to find out about future plans for Bubble Saga’s growth, but it looks like the developer has added a planet since launching open beta and could indeed add more to extend gameplay. Additional social features might also be in the works; the game only very recently got leaderboard support and the only other social feature we know of is the life-gifting system and the ability to achieve “King of the Level” status when you beat a friend’s standing score on a specific level. We also observe that the game has a significant international audience in both French and Spanish languages, which could suggest an aggressive localization plan behind the game’s steady growth.

Bubble Saga’s still got a long way to go to unseat Gardens of Time as our top game by growth in the weekly MAU and DAU rankings. You can follow the game’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Source: Inside Social Games