Goober may be an odd nickname, but Justin James didn’t mind when a friend gave it to him back in Grade 7. He even seemed to like it. At the time, the now Digital Media and IT grad (class of 2011) – whose first language may as well have been HTML – was already building websites and working toward a video game that, like any in a highly competitive market, would need a name that would attract attention. Evidently, Goobers was perfect.

This November, Goobers, available online through James’s company J3 Gaming Inc., turns six. And though it’s free to play – and has been worldwide – in-game purchases of levels, skills and other Goober-enhancing items generated enough revenue to put James through school, ultimately landing him a spot as programmer with Fluik Entertainment Inc. working on hit mobile game app Office Jerk.

Recently, we caught up with him in Los Angeles, Calif., where he was spending time with a design agency to learn how to bring augmented reality to apps, which means enhancing live-action, real-world images with computer-generated sights and sounds.

Also fresh from completing his own mobile game app called Free Candy for the Android Market, James took the time to explain Goobers, his surprise at its success, and what it takes to succeed in a rapidly evolving video game market. Here's what he had to say.

Goobers is set in an age where any creature can exist, and magic is possible. You start with almost nothing in a busy medieval town. You leave the town to fight monsters and gain items to sell. I would work every day on this game from after school until bed, building it like Lego. What I like about it is the feeling of being able to escape into an entirely new world.

In the beginning, I had to buy a $2,000 tower server computer to run the game, plus RAM upgrades, and so on. Now, I run it using very high-speed Internet. This costs about $100 per month, which is also paid for by players’ purchases.

Its success surprised me. On the first day the game went live, we had our first player within 10 minutes. We had only posted information about the game on one online forum. That same week, we reached more than 10 players online at the same time. The record is 380 players online at once, on June 27, 2010.

The game got picked up in Mexico. Around 50 per cent of my players seem to be from there. Another 25 per cent are from Egypt. This puzzles me. Sometimes I think Google might be helping me out with keywords – like people looking for a translation of goober, maybe. In the online world when something like that happens, you just say “thank you” and keep moving. Free advertising is hard to find.

The video game market is changing. Six years ago it was easy for a 2D role playing game like Goobers to gain popularity if it was fun. With 3D games being easier and quicker to make, simpler games have to be perfectly designed. After all, the “hardcore” console or PC gamers are only going to demand more of what the industry has been producing: beautiful, 3D games with rich stories and endless hours of game-play.

Overall, the future of gaming is in portable devices like smartphones and tablets for casual gamers. That said, there’s a higher gaming expectation for these, too. Today people just want to pick up the game and know how to play without much of a learning curve.

For anyone looking to succeed in this industry now, you need to set goals you can reach but which are still on the edge of creativity. Then you need to stay focused; you've got to have the drive to put in long days for as long as it takes. You never know when you might catch a break or find investors or even a large group of players. Just keep building.

As for Goobers’ future, I want to keep the game going for as long as possible. I do still make just enough money from it to cover the Internet costs, and that’s all that matters to me, because if one person still enjoys playing it, I would feel terrible taking that away.