[TFord]

Turning your passion into your profession is the dream of every hobbyist, but one amateur game developer turned that dream into reality with a smash hit iPhone puzzle game, CNN reports this week.

Steve Demeter wrote "Trism", a sliding-block, color-matching puzzle game, in his spare time, and put it on Apple's App Store for $4.99. Just two months later, the game had earned Demeter over $250,000, and prompted him to quit his day job at a bank and start a development studio.

Demeter's studio, Demiforce, is working on five new games, including the sequel to Trism.

Want to get in on the action yourself? Go right ahead: companies like Apple and Microsoft (with the Xbox 360's new Community Games channel) have begun to provide bedroom developers easy, low-cost ways to develop on hardware that was once closed off to all but the biggest games makers. But with low barriers to entry comes lots of competition. Over 1,500 games are currently available on the iPhone's App Store, according to CNN, compared to about 900 two months ago.

There's an example of the American Dream in action!