There are plenty of commercial game engines that offer the ability to develop for multiple platforms, but when you're attempting to build a competitive, valuable mobile publisher, there's a strong argument for cooking up your own tech.

That's what US publisher TinyCo has been doing.

It's just formally announced that it's been working on what it calls the Griffin engine; with the Android version of its Tiny Village the firstfruits of the project.

Thanks to the tool, TinyCo expects to release iOS and Android versions of its social games simultaneously; app store issues withstanding of course.

Two for one

The Griffin engine enables TinyCo's development teams to write one set of code that can be compiled for iOS and Android with complete feature and content parity, while also eliminating fragmentation issues thanks to its automatic resizing to support the different screen sizes and resolutions for various mobile and tablets.

"In the past, we've developed for iOS and Android separately. We quickly realized there was a better way that didn't require twice as many engineers and twice the amount of development time, or the extra hassle of fragmented development," said Suli Ali, TinyCo's CEO.

"Our Griffin Engine truly is the first platform agnostic mobile social game engine built by mobile social game developers. TinyCo has ushered in a new era of platform compatibility and efficiency."