Nimblebit takes its bitizens to the next level with airline simulator Pocket Planes

Nimblebit, the company behind the successful Tiny Tower game - 13 million downloads and counting - doesn’t believe in taking breaks.

It's been regularly updating its big hit but it's still found time to develop something new.

Pocket Planes is scheduled for a summer 2012 release and will be a free-to-play release on Android and iOS devices.

Following in the footsteps of Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes is a sim game that allows players to try their hand at running an airline.

Indeed, in terms of graphical style and gameplay, it's very much Tiny Tower meets the airline business, but instead of placing your bitizens in a job in a tower, you have to shuttle them around the world.

With 250 cities across awaiting them, the scope and challenge of Pocket Planes is sure to please fans of expansive time-based sims.

With the whole world in play, it is fitting – and expected – that players will need to manage a number of different aircraft to access all those cities. Smaller airports will require tiny propeller planes while trans-oceanic flights will call for massive jumbo jets.

Whether a player plans to haul passengers or cargo, Pocket Planes will have a fleet ready to support their simulated aircraft empire.

Dress to impress

In addition to building an airline from scratch, Pocket Planes will also give players the ability to customise all aspects of their newly founded airline. Players can tweak everything from the uniforms worn by the pilots to the individual parts in a plane.

Further, plane parts can also be traded to other players via the Mobage social network (on Android), which Pocket Planes will make use of to allow for worldwide group events and competitions.

It's not clear how this will work on iOS, but we're guessing either/or Game Center or Mobage.

Also, there's no specific news on a release, but Tiny Tower was released in June, so we're hoping it will be before then.