Longtime NYC casual game shop Large Animal shutters

It's a familiar story, and always a sad one: An independent studio loses a publisher deal and fails to find the funding it needs to bridge the gap between projects, forcing its closure.

This time, the studio in question is 13-year old New York City casual developer Large Animal Games, as revealedby co-founders Wade Tinney and Josh Welber in a blog post on the company's site, which includes the photo above, dated March 2012.

Large Animal is recently responsible for the mobile game Color Zen , and also developed licensed products for entities such as Universal Film, and the USA and AMC television networks.

The post reveals that the company's games will continue to be available to players, but the studio will not be releasing any more products. Its current focus is helping its affected staff find new jobs elsewhere.

If you're interested in taking a peek at the company's history, Tinney wrote a postmortem of RocketBowl in 2005 for this website.