TinyCo

The absence of Clint Barton in the hit mobile gaming app Avengers Academy has been somewhat of a running joke between fans and developers, but after being promised for so long the archer Avenger is finally joining the game. Unfortunately for him, he's signing up for class just as all of the robot practice dummies rebel as the villain of the new event is none other than the metallic menace of Ultron!

Hope you weren't planning on taking a moment to catch your breath in Marvel Avengers Academy. Just as the Captain Britain event has come to a close, which followed almost immediately on the heels of the Civil War event, TinyCo and Marvel have announced a special Spider-Man event kicking off this week. If you're like me, you've been furiously checking in every day, making sure all your characters are completing as many tasks as possible to save up the necessary in-game currency to unlock the newest roster additions. As of late, that's proven to be an incredible challenge. The upcoming Spider-Man event looks to be no different, in that at least six new characters are coming to the Academy. Oh, and a bunch of alternate costumes.

Outside of a few family friendly exceptions, Marvel's video game catalog over the past few years has been decidedly mobile-focused. Currently, there are four different Marvel video games which can be found on iOS and Android devices almost exclusively, including this year's latest addition to the catalog, Marvel Avengers Academy. We spoke with Marvel Avengers Academy Art Lead David Nakayama about designing this world and these characters, and setting Avengers Academy apart from the rest of Marvel's current gaming library. We've also got an exclusive look at some of the concept art for the hit mobile game.

The idea behind Marvel Avengers Academy is fairly simple. Your favorite Marvel characters have been transported back to their high school days, and you've got to build up the school grounds so the heroes will be better prepared to tackle the HYDRA threat looming just beyond the walls. Though Marvel's had numerous young heroes try to fill the archetypes of the actual Avengers over the years, it's rare that the classic core members are portrayed as angsty, hormonal time-bombs obsessed with social media, DJing, flipping off authority figures and hooking up. Developed by TinyCo, the team behind the Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, Marvel Avengers Academy is another basic city-builder game in that vein. You won't have to worry about managing loads of resources and the population's happiness like you would in a game like SimCity or Civilization, and you don't have to worry about attacking or defending like you would in other mobile games like Clash of Clans or Star Wars Commander. You're building your school on your terms, and the only thing in your way is how long it takes to get anything done. Well, that and HYDRA. And the game's constant needling for you to spend money.

Since we didn't actually get to spend much time with the Avengers in their formative days, TinyCo's figured that's the perfect timeframe to place its upcoming game, Avengers Academy. Instead of being the underpowered teens they would have been in the real comic world, Avengers Academy takes the heroes and villains we all know today, powers and all, and drops them into the most dangerous adventure yet: high school. With the constant bickering, backstabbing, odd romantic entanglements, power dynamic struggles and all the drama being a tightly knit group of friends entails, you'd think the Avengers were perpetually stuck in high school already. That's not the case, though you could argue being stuck in relatively the same five years of their lives over the last 50 years is equally as terrifying as being stuck in high school for eternity.

Ah, high school. Who could forget the first time you skipped class? Remember your first real crush? Or how about that time you had to break into the AIM laboratories to make sure your science project got you an "A"? What, you never had to deal with AIM when you were a kid? What about trickster gods? Dude-bro scientists with a trust fund? Handsome straight-edge dudes that seem like they're from a bygone era? Maybe that's because you went to a real school, and not the made-up one at the center of TinyCo's upcoming mobile game, Marvel Avengers Academy. You might remember TinyCo from its last game, Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff. The free-to-play mobile building game arena has become crowded over the years, but licensed properties still manage to stand out from the crowd. Though there aren't any gameplay details about Marvel Avengers Academy available yet, it will follow in the same vein, allowing you to build your own Avengers-themed high school campus, and then manage all the heroes and villains that populate the world. In this case though, you won't just be deal with Marvel's current crop of teen heroes. All of the big guns have been de-aged to a time when they could easily pass as classmates for Kamala Khan and Miles Morales.