Wubble – the Cayman-made iPhone App and What’s next for the guy behind it

I love when I get to do these kind of stories. Garth Humphreys is a Caymanian web designer and programmer with a serious passion for developing games. He started teaching himself to code in 1999 then in 2010 developed a game application called Wubble and became the first Caymanian to have an app accepted and on sale in the Apple store.

So what is Wubble? It’s an amalgamation of the words, ‘Word’ and ‘Bubble’ – it’s an anagram game. Here’s how it’s described on gaming sites- What do you get when you put letters in bubbles? You get Wubble! How many words can you unscramble? Challenge your friends! Burst their bubble with the highest score in the game called Wubble.

The game concept was developed by Garth after a conversation with his fiancée Camille. They mashed up the themes of bubbles, the ocean and word games and got Wubble which started as an online flash game that was then picked up by global internet publishing firm OneAppAtATime.com, who got it published onto the Apple iTunes App Store. “Evan Henshaw-Plath of OneAppAtATime had been someone that was really well-known in the tech industry. He’d worked at Yahoo, was part of the development team at Twitter at the very beginning and it was a great opportunity,” Garth explains.

“When I heard, I was excited as there had been some issues with Apple and Flash so it took around five months for it to go live. I kept clicking refresh over and over again then about two hours later it was on there. It was  awesome experience to see the hard work  out there in all the Apple stores worldwide.”

Now while the game, priced at US$1.99 sold pretty decently, he’s still not happy with its performance. It was his first, so he noted his many lessons learnt and is already at work on a new iPad game that’s a multiplayer with loads of action.

Lessons Learnt from Developing Gaming App #1

1. The spelling and word games never do well and it seems users tend to gravitate towards the action one’s.

2. Users want to pick it up and play and continue a game I didn’t do with Wubble.

3. Overall marketing plays a huge role in a game’s success

So for his new game ” it’s going to be much more fun with two player matches on the iPad.”

Don’t you just love when these stories come out of the Caribbean. God knows I do.

Quite timely that this is also our 800th Blog Post on SiliconCaribe.com.