Backyard Monsters showing D.A.V.E.
Backyard Monsters is a game created by Kixeye with David Scott as its co-founder, where players create and manage a base filled with monsters in their backyard. This backyard is part of a larger world where many other players attack, defend, and build, all trying to create the greatest backyard empire. It can be seen as a mix of Desktop Tower Defense, Travian, and The Space Game. The game currently runs on Facebook.
Gameplay
How To Play: The goal of Backyard Monsters is to create the best base ever, by building and upgrading defenses, collecting resources, building and upgrading buildings like housings and academies, and more. Attacking other players or defending your base from their attacks is also one of the goals.
You start with a week's protection from all attacks. In this time it is important to focus on managing your base instead of attempting to attack. If you attempt to attack anyone, the protection will wear off instantly and the person you attacked (unless the enemy is a Wild Monster Tribe) and people in range of two levels up will be able to attack you. Also, if you attack someone a higher level than you (there is no limit of how high of a level person you can attack) then they will have "vengeance" and will be able to attack you as many times as you attack them. You will find some hints in the First Week Strategy. However, there are many other ways to play the game as well!
During damage protection, either starter or from someone attacking you, you must concentrate on defenses. Other buildings come last. Tesla Towers and Laser Towers should be built, then upgraded to (at least) level 3 to improve your defense system. Note that defensive buildings would be inactive during upgrades, so do not upgrade all of them at the same time.
Once you are at Map Room 2, players can attack anyone regardless of level. You can now conquer outposts to expand your empire. An outpost is like a mini-yard. There are also more servers that can be found here.
History
Development started in the first half of 2009, under the name 'Desktop Creatures'. BM was a big project for the Casual Collective. Early 2010, it was decided that Backyard Monsters would (initially) only be released to Facebook. This led to a lot of protest, to which Critters reacted with a parodic YouTube video, showing Adolf Hitler getting angry for this move.
After the graphics initially had a different style, Critters decided to make the game look isometric. Some testers disagreed and thought that it should revert back. Critters argued that they had been wanting to go isometric for some time, but had never gotten around to it.
Name Contest
On Tuesday, December 29, 2009, Critters posted a news item saying that he was interested in having the game renamed, because unlike the name, the game had nothing to do with a desktop. The CC community responded with a huge list of new name suggestions and the game was renamed to 'Backyard Monsters' in Feb 2010.
Keys
As always, a new game needs testing. Normally this is done by alpha and beta testers only. After having been distributed to all alphas, Critters started to distribute a limited number of access keys each day this time, based on first come, first served. First this was done to beta testers, later to a broader public. Passes were handed out at CC Forums, Facebook and Twitter. Each time an entry code was given, that could be used only by a limited number of people. On the end of March, the game was set to public alpha/beta.
Reception
The game was relatively unnoticed for the first few weeks of its being public but a few months after its launch hit the mainstream and met increasing growth rates, and soared in popularity receiving an average rating of 4.8 over 175,000 reviews. As of November 18th, it has 3,111,049 monthly active and 716,088 daily active users on Facebook, and is the 89th biggest application on Facebook in terms of monthly active members and the 55th biggest application in terms of daily active members. Up-to-date statistics can be viewed here.
Trivia
- Backyard Monsters was once called "Desktop Creatures".
- During the FIFA World Cup in 2010, Monster were able to play soccer in the housing.
- On March 12th, 2010, Backyard Monsters updated their interface to one similar to what we see today.
- Backyard Monsters will have a mobile version of the game, provided that you have Android and/or iOS devices.
- People often call Backyard Monsters "BYM" for short.
- Google+ is now shutted down on 15th July, due to massive amount of bugs that made the gameplay unfavorable. This goes for every other social gaming site aside from Facebook. Anyone who purchased shiny from those sites can contact KIXEYE for compensation to any of the two sites.
- Backyard Monsters was created on the mathematical pi day, coincidentially.