This past year my wife and I were busy behind the scenes creating our first iPhone game. Me, being the entrepreneurial spirit and always chasing the shiny object, 
thought, what the hell, if they can do it, I can do it.
I guess we were trying to get in on the new found gold rush happening in the app store.
Unfortunately, things don’t always work out as imagined.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Knowing virtually nothing about the subject, we went at it with an idea: Let’s create a game about our dogs. They’ll catch frisbees. It will be easy and fun, like the hit iPhone game Paper Toss, where you throw crumbled paper at a trash can. This was a good model to follow, I thought.
1) What went wrong – we made a somewhat easy idea, very complex and difficult. What started off as 5 scenes and one dog, turned into 5 scenes, 9 levels per scene, 5 dogs and 3 throwing objects. Are you confused? I was too!
2) What went wrong – me, being the master outsource manager, thought I could get a designer for cheap and a developer even cheaper, and have this whole game done for under $1k. Silly me.
The final game cost $2,650. I went the cheap route and got hammered for it. I hired a designer in Pakistan. He was in the middle of planning his wedding, he gave me a couple of designs and fell off the face of the earth. I hired a developer from India, he signed my NDA and fell off the face of the earth.
I found a new designer in Romania who would finish my game design at double the rate. I found a game developer in Ukraine who would develop my game for triple my original rate.
At the end of the day, it took one year for this game to get done. It should’ve taken 3 months max.
3) What went wrong – creating an iPhone game with your wife sounds fun, right? Well, that’s if you agree on everything… Just not the case with us.
I pretty much thought I knew everything and found myself closed lipped most of the time. I’ll let you fill in the blanks…
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