Matt Rix is the guy behind Trainyard, a puzzle game for the iPhone. Besides the fact that it’s on sale for $.99, it’s a heck of a lot of fun. If you don’t have it you should check it out. However this isn’t a review, he’s got enough of those.
Matt was nice enough to share his Trainyard story with the rest of us mortals down here trying to strike app store oil. Beware, Matt’s story is one of those dangerously inspiring stories that’ll make you feel like you too can make millions overnight if you have a good idea. Let me spare you the suspense; you can’t. Well, you probably can’t. As long as you go into his article thinking of it as less of a blueprint and more of a good story, you’ll find it interesting. Don’t get your hopes up if you’re looking for hard sales numbers. It seems yet another developer has been persuaded to keep their detailed sales data to themself. Surprise surprise.
One last thing before I close… Matt talks briefly about Cocos2d, the freely available framework for building iPhone apps. He described it as “similar to Flash”, which caught my attention. It comes packed with physics engines Box2D and Chipmunk, has tilemap support and includes hooks into all sorts of other iPhone and game related needs. I intend to look into it and based on Matt’s recommendation I’ll suggest that any other Flash developers interested in iPhone development go ahead and give it a look as well. Let me know what you find :)
To the developers, I’ll say this: When you’re cooking up your next app, keep the words of Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm in mind. “…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Make apps that fill a need, innovate or do something better than an existing app. Flooding the store with dress-up games and soundboards just because we can will only leave us with: I told you so.