Interviews

Talking over the iFarm phenomenon with creator PlayMesh

CEO Charles Ju chats app rotation

Talking over the iFarm phenomenon with creator PlayMesh
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| iFarm (iPhone)

The gaming world, it seems, has gone farming mad. If you need convincing over how popular farm-based play can be, consider PlayMesh's one million downloads of iFarm.

Intrigued, we decided to get the lowdown from the developer on PlayMesh itself and, of course, its highly successful game. CEO Charles Ju was kind enough to reply.

Pocket Gamer: To begin, perhaps it would be wise to explain what do you exactly do in iFarm?

Charles Ju: iFarm is the first fully featured farm game on the iPhone. It is a simple yet addictive game where players grow and decorate their farms to gain levels and earn coins.

Farm sizes can stretch to 100 plots of land, where players can plow and grow a wide variety of crops including pumpkins, strawberries and soybeans. There are also decorations that help complement the farm, ranging from sturdy silos to cute gnomes to menacing scarecrows. It even has its own soundtrack.

Can you tell us a little about PlayMesh?

Founded in July 2008, PlayMesh is the leader in social gaming on the iPhone and a premiere game producer that has had over ten titles break into the top 25 applications on the iPhone. PlayMesh is focusing on bringing the power of social games, traditionally found on sites like Facebook and MySpace, onto the iPhone.

The most popular games produced by PlayMesh are iMafia, a
graphically-enabled massively multiplayer role-playing game, and Link4 Online, a real-time multiplayer game that pits players against each other in this classic game of linking four pieces in a row.

What was the driving force behind putting farming onto the iPhone, aside from the obviously popularity of such titles?

iFarm is the next step in our mission to bring social gaming to the iPhone. We are excited to bring the farm simulation genre onto the iPhone after seeing its runaway success on various platforms in Asia and in the US on Facebook.

Outside of its obvious popularity, the mobile platform is in our opinion a much better platform for farming games in general. Being able to harvest anywhere you have reception makes the game exponentially more fun.

Some have criticised iFarm as being currently limited in its scope when compared with other farm sims. How would you respond?

This is our first iteration of the game. We're pushing updates on a bi-weekly basis for the near future to catch up.

Given the immense success of social farm games like FarmVille and FarmTown, how will you react if and when these social gaming giants release their versions onto iPhone?

We always welcome competition. We think it will help drive us to create a better product.

A lot of people see playing social games as a way of passing the time while on Facebook. Do you think that as a result of this an iPhone variant will not get the same level of interest - purely because of the lack of Facebook interaction?

We think there is a much better market on the iPhone simply because people are more bored when they're on the go with their iPhone as opposed to when they have access to their computer and Facebook.

With so many farm games out there, what differentiates iFarm from the 'rest of the herd', as it were?

We have an extensive social network built out in the backend with a history of producing quality social games on the iPhone. And as of right now there are no other major farm games on the iPhone.

Your staff roster is currently at just five. Is it a strain to create and maintain the content players expect from games of this nature?

Definitely, but we're expanding aggressively to remedy this problem.

Obviously every game will involve difficulties along the way. What were some of the worst when developing iFarm?

Figuring out how to cram so many features into such a limited screen space. Adjusting our gameplay to be robust for those with bad internet. And scaling our servers for the specific model of interaction that farm games ask for.

Where do you see iFarm and other farm games evolving?

We're going to work hard on bringing more social feature and content and expand gameplay.

You've already enjoyed over one million downloads in a very short space time. To what do you attribute this success?

We are the best and first full-featured farm game on the iPhone.

Our thanks to Charles Ju for his time.
Ben Griffin
Ben Griffin
Having said farewell to university life, Ben decided to follow his ultimate dream of getting paid to play games. Luckily, Pocket Gamer was more than happy to help in his quest.