It was our first IOS project: we had all to learn (objective-c, cocos2d, IOS sdk, device capacities, xcode…). We planned to do a simple game just to learn and test the AppStore.

But finally, we created a real game with a lot of graphical resources.

October 18 (week 42): I tell my web designer about my idea: he loves videogame, so no need to convince him, create a game (even for children) can only be fun! So we started to work on the concept and I tried to create a prototype with cocos2d during the first 2 weeks.

Third week: we have to think about graphical resources and budget: Jean-Yvon is web designer, not cartoonist nor illustrator. We wanted to create animated realistic animals and landscape: how to do that?
The cost appeared to be the main problem: I asked a price quotation to a cartoonist for 24 vector animals (which will be animated in Flash) and landscape: 30 days of work was needed (so € 10,000 without animations for the first world)… A lot much for us!

Finally, we find a friend who made artworks on paper. Jean-yvon then manually vectorizd them on Illustrator and animated each animal with Flash (using skeleton technique) before exporting frames in png format.
We need the same time (30 days) but the cost is only the labor cost (so €4000 by world).

Then during 6 month, we worked hard to create the engine and graphical resources (see other posts about designer's work and developer's work).

In May, the game was ready with Farm and Africa worlds. But we have to do the marketing stuff: create this website, a Facebook page, a trailer … so 3 weeks of work again.

The game was send to Apple validation on May 10 and was reviewed on May 19. The release date will be June 10.