When it comes to finding the next Zynga, it's US social mobile publishers such as Storm8, Pocket Gems, Funzio and TinyCo that are leading the charge.

Yet, the one big advantage Mark Pincus' outfit had was it was harnessed to the social rocketship that was Facebook.

Sure, there was plenty of competition and engineering challenges, but getting stuck into the unregulated virality of the platform early enough provided the momentum it needed.

Smaller, quicker

When it comes to iOS and Android, there's certainly plenty of user growth for publishers to hook into, but virality's less easy and there are more technical challenges.

It's the latter that TinyCo has most recently been targeting with the announcement of its Griffin engine.

"We used to develop on iOS and then port to Android, but it wasn't efficient as we needed twice as many engineers, twice the development time, and the Android version would always lag behind the iOS version," says TinyCo's biz dev director Jennifer Lu, of the situation that inspired the seven month development process.

Invest for the future

Even with $18 million raised in its initial funding round, baking your own engine is a time consuming and expensive solution, but having evaluated all the other commercial options, Lu says the company couldn't find anything it really liked, and so took the plunge.

"It was a huge deal for us, but we're very engineering-focused." Lu explains.

For this reason, the Griffin engine is based on C++, ensuring that TinyCo's games, despite using isometric graphics offer native performance for the best user experience.

It also comes with its own analytics suit which feeds into industry standard tools Vertica and Tableau, a virtual item push system, push notification, support for third party social integration and what TinyCo calls a Tier 1 toolchain.

Experimenting with others

In contrast, DeNA/ngmoco's new game making technology for its Mobage social platform is based around JavaScript; something Lu says just doesn't offer the same performance benefits.

Still, with the market remaining nascent, especially in terms of distribution, TinyCo has signed a deal to bring some of its games such as Tiny Chef and Tiny Nightclub to Mobage for Android.

"It's looking to expand aggressively, especially outside of Japan, so we'll see how those games do," says Lu of the deal, which in some ways could be seen as working with a potential competitor.

But with the market growing and changing so quickly, currently there's plenty of cake to share and only so many areas that any one company can focus on.

And for TinyCo that's the competitive advantage releasing simultaneously on iOS and Android will provide.

"As soon as we launch a game on iOS, players ask when it's coming out on Android, because they want to play with their friends or they've just changed devices," Lu explains of the user demands required if you want to succeed in social mobile gaming.

"Launching on iOS and Android is great from a marketing point. You just can't focus on one platform anymore."