"You've gone out into the wilderness to start a new life," said Brian Reynolds, Zynga's chief game designer. "You're actually raising a virtual family on the frontier."

"You can add a frontier spouse, create little child avatars," Reynolds, who led the development of FrontierVille, told AFP.

Zynga claims more than 230 million monthly active users of its games, which include "Mafia Wars," "Treasure Isle," "Zynga Poker," "Cafe World," "FishVille" and "PetVille" in addition to "FarmVille."

FrontierVille shares some similarities with FarmVille but provides "a fresh game play experience in a new setting and some really new interesting ways to interact with your friends," Reynolds said.

"The heart of social gaming is your ability to play them with your real friends on Facebook," he said. "You can tend their crops, feed their animals --- boost your reputation by helping your friends."

"We've created the idea of much more of a living world than maybe there was in social games past," Reynolds said.

"It's not going to be exactly the way it was every time you come back to it," he said. "Weeds will actually grow. Little trees grow into bigger trees.

"There's a sense that the world is alive," he said. "There's animals hiding in there, there's snakes and bears and groundhogs."

Reynolds said FrontierVille would first appear on Facebook before possibly moving to other platforms.

"We always tend to start them on Facebook," he said. "Things like the iPhone represent a logical progression if the game is really popular."

The purchase of virtual goods by game players accounts for 90 percent of Zynga's revenue, according to the San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2007.

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