Big Fish Games just released a new game that I helped make! It’s called My Tribe and it’s a Facebook game! Check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/MyTribe. You get to grow your tribe and look after them in a tropical setting as well as construct buildings, make farms, craft clothing, discover science, plus tons of other cool stuff!

My Tribe was originally a downloadable casual game for PC/Mac and we turned it into a Facebook game in the Big Fish Games Vancouver studio. I helped with the design and programming and did the sound design.

The game is doing *really* well since we released it last week and it’s going to become a huge hit. Watch this space!

Please help me out and become a fan. Thanks!

You may not know this but BFG recently added a new feature to their top 100 which allows you to filter by a chosen genre. Previously you could see the top 33 in each genre by going to the main page for that genre, but the difference with the top 100 filtering is that it shows the peak, weeks on and date released!

However, a word of caution, be careful when reading the peak. The reason is that sometimes it shows the peak in the top 100, and other times the peak in the genre. For example, in the match-3 genre Holiday Bonus is shown to have a peak of 54 which I know was what it reached in the top 100 because I saw it, but Unwell Mel is shown to have a peak of 1 which it has not yet reached in the top 100, it’s only no. 1 in the match-3 genre. Also The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shows a peak of 30 but I knew it got to no. 10 (I took a screenshot at the time). So something weird is going on, I’m not sure the figures can be trusted properly (shame otherwise it would have been ultra awesome). Anyway it’s still useful to see the whole current 100 for that genre.

Following on from my post the other day about an iphone millionaire I’ve read another great success story about a guy who worked in a bank and coded a game in his spare time which made him $250,000 in two months. Naturally he quit his job and is making games full time now.

Also I watched this great slide show about iPhone App Store secrets with some really neat statistics about iPhone sales. Check it out if you are thinking about making a free or paid game or app as it’s great info!

The other night I did a whole load of research into making an iPhone game and even studied Objective C syntax (it’s pretty easy, just C++ with a load of square brackets and auto-garbage collection). The iPhone game/app market is booming right now but it’s also very easy to get into. Now may be the last chance to quickly and easily get a game out there which is successful before a) the market gets saturated and b) the big companies start making big budget games that small companies can no longer compete with.

Anyway I’m thinking of making something for fun, so watch this space…Oh I also may post all my research and links (FAQs and resources etc) if anyone is interested.