The original My Tribe was a popular downloadable game developed by Big Fish Games’ Vancouver studio. Because it was in the simulation genre and things happened in it over time, it seemed to be a natural fit for the social gaming boom on Facebook.
My wife and I were experienced in social gaming and Flash from the Atlantis/Big Sea Games days, so we moved to Canada to work with the Vancouver studio on the Facebook version of My Tribe.
My first assignment was to go through the code base and optimize the game.
The next assignment was to create mini-games and integrate them with the main game. For this, I built a flexible API for converting a player’s performance in mini-games into tokens that could be used to acquire items within the main game. One could also purchase tokens with Facebook credits or real currency to acquire items faster. The API contained a high-score system, so mini-games could have rankings of a player and his or her friends, and there was a challenge system so a player could invite his or her friends to compete on the scoreboards. The API could also support any type of mini-game, so we could develop more mini-games over time. The API could also be used in other Facebook games besides My Tribe in the future.
Four mini-games for My Tribe were developed using the API. One of them, Coconut Crash, was made by me. It was inspired by pachinko games in Japan, and it used a simple physics engine I developed. A player controlled a coconut cannon and aimed it at targets. Each target would be worth a certain amount of points and have a certain amount of reaction force, and each map might have different gravity. When the coconut launches from the cannon, its trajectory is affected by gravity. The coconut may bounce off whatever it hits, and the point multiplier goes up as the coconut hits more targets. Eventually, the coconut falls off the map and you receive a final score. You might earn extra coconuts by hitting certain items, and some items caused target pipes to appear at the bottom of the map. If the coconut fell into one of those pipes, you’d receive a big score bonus. Once you were out of coconuts, you’d receive a final score tally, and the score would be converted into tokens for the in-app purchases.
My Tribe Facebook went offline in November 2011.