This past year has been an exciting time for Venveo. We opened a new office, had some great projects, launched a new venveo.com, and developed our first iPhone application. 

Earlier in 2009 we set out to develop an iPhone application so that we could showcase our skills to our clients. We wanted something that had graphics, motion, physics, and ultimately was fun. So what did we decide on… Yard Games .  This app is a combination of 4 games in 1; cornhole, horseshoes, lawn darts, and bocce.

Apple’s SDK was a little overwhelming at first but here is how we went about developing our app:

1. Strategy & Planning : First we set out to come up with a creative idea that hadn’t been done before.  Once deciding on Yard Games we had to develop what the user interface would look like and how a person would even begin to play and interact with our app.  We went back and forth on quite a few issues but the planning of this project made everything move much more smoothly. 
2. Design : After laying the groundwork of how everything would function we got into the graphics. We wanted a light-hearted game that showcased slick 2D graphics. We designed every screen a player would encounter and tweaked the gameboard quite a bit.
3. Develop : This was by far the longest phase of the process. We do quite a lot of flash development so we thought the animation would be easy. Although it became easier as the project went on there are some signifcant differences from flash and developing an iPhone app that gave us some real problems. For instance, all of the moving objects and animation have to be seperated and programmed individually which was more time intensive than originally anticipated. Also, we tried to get too fancy with our animation that resulted in us having to reevaluate the gameplay even after we already planned everything out. No worries though, we are quite pleased with how it turned out.
4. Quality Assurance : We didn’t want to launch the app prematurely so we did very thorough testing and even tried a few different phsyics engines to ensure we chose the one which ran most smoothly and was the least likely to crash.
5. Launch : this was the easy part. We submitted the app to iTunes and within a week it was being showcased on the store and being bought by people all around the world.

So in conclusion, we learned a lot in the process but the biggest thing we learned was that we want to develop more apps. They are extremely fun to design, develop, and test.  There are some things we would probably do differently if we had to go back and develop the same app but I think we’ll just concentrate on our efforts on our client’s applications.

Click here to check out our app on iTunes