In the small university town of Trondheim, Norway, some NTNU students formed a gaming company, Dirtybit, and managed to capture some lightening in a bottle with FunRun – the multiplayer side scrolling racing game that got over 40 million downloads and topped App Store charts. In FunRun you had to pilot your cartoon character on a sidescrolling racetrack while dodging barriers in the road and attacks from other players. The game was unique for allowing real-time multiplayer racing, something not really seen in 2012 when the game launched.
In their newly released title, Dino Dash, Dirtybit is staying close to what they know, employing nearly the same mechanics and visual style, but giving FunRun a bit of a reset for 2014. Dino Dash has updated graphics and sound, allows for six total friends to race at the same time, and puts in some new game modes like Elimination and Boss Fight.
“We aim to make it easy for friends to play together and have a lot of fun, so we’ve taken what we’ve learned from Fun Run and the feedback from our users into the core of Dino Dash. With Dino Dash we’ve created a scalable system and made the realtime multiplayer experience much more enjoyable and seamless for the player,” says Nicolaj Petersen, CoFounder and COO of Dirtybit.
FunRun’s multiplayer dynamic took over classrooms in the U.S., and hearing Petersen pitch in Oslo, it was crazy to learn that some teachers even incorporated FunRun into their lectures to help keep kids engaged. To build even more competition between friends or classrooms, in DinoDash players can also create their own custom leaderboards to host their own tournaments between friends.
On the monetization side, players can buy new characters, hats, unique skills, celebration animations, and powerups using the in-game currency that you can gain after winning races, or in an in-app purchase.
“With Dino Dash we aim to show that Fun Run wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder, and that we’re able to innovate with our games. Large gaming companies are trying to create the same multiplayer system, so we’re really excited to set the standard and continue to be the market leader in this space,” says Petersen.
The game is available on iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.
