New York, NY —

Cell phone games sell for as little as 99 cents and can generate millions of dollars in profit. The market for mobile games is booming and developers in New York City are getting in on it.

And not every game involves a bloody car chase, grunting athletes, or axe wielding dwarfs. One developer, Joe Kauffman, says his target market is 60-year-old women. In one of his games, “Danger Cats,” wide-eyed yellow cats are precariously balanced on piles of random objects: watermelons, concrete blocks, and a canister of gasoline.

“You need to get them back down safely to solid ground by tapping away or clicking on the objects,” Kauffman says.

It took Kauffman a week and a half to create the game, and so far, he's made about $5,000 selling it on the iTunes app store. He's made another $5,000 selling a game featuring adventurous squirrels, for $1.99 a download.

Screen shot from "Danger Cats."

Kauffman, 37, designs Web sites for a living. He's developed games for desktop computers but has only been developing games for phones for a month and a half now. But that's how dynamic this market is, with new people jumping in every day to develop games for mobile phones.

Kauffman says you don't need to be a hardcore programmer to build a game today because companies have created languages that are easy to use. So, the barriers to entry are low and the rewards are potentially very high.

Anyone with an iPhone, or a smart phone, is a potential consumer. And that's a lot of people.

“It's exciting because it's kind of like gambling. Your next game could be the next big million-dollar hit. There's no stopping you,” Kauffman says.

For the first time, the annual Game Developers Conference, underway this week in San Francisco, is focusing on iPhone games because of their growing success.

Of the all-time top 18 downloaded paid apps at the iTunes store, 14 are games.

Big players like Electronic Arts and Game Loft are catching on, but the platform continues to draw many more independent developers because Apple offers anyone an immediate distribution channel with its iTunes store.

Independent developers don't have the resources to invest in marketing and set up payment systems, but Apple takes care of that.

One of the most downloaded games today is called “Doodle Jump.” The graphics are straight out of a high school Algebra notebook. The point of the game is to launch a green blob from one cloud to another while bouncing off the heads of googly eyed creatures.

Igor Pusenjak created "Doodle Jump" in three months with his brother Marko, who lives in Croatia. The game launched one year ago.

“My goal, initially, was to make some pocket change. Maybe $300 or $1,000 a month,” Pusenjak says.

His app now has over three million downloads, and at .99 cents a download, that's about $3 million, minus the 30 percent Apple takes as its cut. In total, the brothers have earned more than $2 million with “Doodle Jump.”

Screen shot from "Doodle Jump."

The two brothers have been working on iPhone apps since the beginning, when Apple opened its app store in the summer of 2008.

Their first app simulated the experience of popping bubbles on a strip of bubble wrap.

On the first day of its release it only sold 58 copies, but the brothers were ecstatic. They added new features, released it again, and sold about 150. Not big numbers by today’s standards, but the brothers learned an encouraging lesson.

“It was a sign that if something as simple as bubble wrap can sell for .99 cents, and people will buy it, there's a way you can actually grow a sustainable and good business if you're smart about how you're doing it,” Pusenjak says.

In 2008, Pusenjak was competing with only about 500 apps; today he's competing with more than 150,000.

Now “Doodle Jump” consumes most of his time. The brothers have updated the game 30 times, constantly adding new features.

“There are UFOs that will abduct you unless you shoot them first. Springs that make you go farther, a propeller head that makes you go farther and, the favorite, jetpacks,” Pusenjak says.

The goal of any developer is to reach the top of Apple's most downloaded list. At first “Doodle Jump” cracked the top 10, but only reached number six, and only for about five minutes.

“My hope was, let’s make it to No. 1 for at least two minutes. We had all these sales but we never had a No. 1,” Pusenjak says

Pusenjak says 40 percent of the game's players are in the U.S., the rest are overseas.

It took Doodle Jump seven months to get to No. 1. But once there, it remained for about three weeks. It is currently at No. 2.