App Ideas

This is the right place to post the question. In fact, if you search the archives of this group you'll find many other people have asked the same question.

In short, the answers usually given, although perhaps not so politely, are:

1. No company cares about your idea unless you can afford to pay them to implement it.

2. Most developers already have a backlog of several apps/games they want to make, so convincing them to work on your app will be very hard.

3. What can you contribute to the project besides the idea? Ideas aren't worth much on their own, so you better be able to contribute one or more of the following: art, sound effects, music, marketing, fully detailed game design

4. Learn to code and make the app yourself.

5. If your idea is really new and unique, others won't understand it and will be unlikely to "steal" it. If someone came to you with the idea of "shooting birds at wooden buildings to kill the pigs in them", I doubt you would consider it could become a hit game a year ago.

Maybe not what you were hoping to hear, but it really is true that ideas are not worth much. What is worth something is bringing the idea to life.

 

Look at the current example of Tiny Wings. It was clearly inspired by the Flash game "Wavespark".

Both games are based on the same idea of "touch to go faster" going up and down hills, but one is nothing more than a demo of a basic game mechanic and the other is a fully realized, polished #1 selling game.

 

I know what you're trying to say, but to refer Wave Spark as "nothing more than a demo of a basic game mechanic" is rather unfair.

Wave Spark is a very fun game with multiple game modes and a big cult following.

Obviously the layer of cuteness that was applied to Tiny Wings is a big factor in it's appeal, but it's a stretch to try and draw conclusions by comparing the (presumably large) number of downloads of WaveSpark, a free flash game, to the number of downloads of Tiny Wings, which is available on iOS.

 

I don't know...I played Wavespark's various modes for about an hour. I find the physics to be too artificial, the graphics are just painful, and the use of straight lines instead of smooth curves ruins the entire effect of trying for smoothness.

It's not the "layer of cuteness" that Tiny Wings adds that makes it great. It's polishing the game mechanic, zooming in and out dynamically, adding defined levels, progressive achievements, score multipliers and more.

It certainly isn't perfect, but even with a less cutesy theme it would be a much better game than Wavespark IMHO.

The one thing I like from Wavespark that Tiny Wings messed up is that in Wavespark you can fly as high as your jumps take you. In Tiny Wings, you bounce off the ceiling and sometimes that screws up your timing. Would be better if it let you go above the clouds like Wavespark lets you go off the screen.

In the end, Wavespark just makes me feel that it was never finished.

 

If you want to learn to code yourself I would recommend starting with

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen G. Kochan

after that book try

Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jef Lamarche

 

I think I have both of those books, the second one is on my desk in front of me.