I’m proud to announce that the first iPhone app I’ve worked on, TextTumble, is now available for sale in the App Store! TextTumble is a unique word game that challenges you to spell words using falling letter and picture tiles. Check out the web site for a video and a link to buy the game.

For quite some time, a business partner and I have been working on the first product for our new venture together. My Magellan Media business partner and developer Chris wrote a great post on his personal blog about all the gory details of the development process, so I’ll leave that to him (definitely read that, it’s a great article). I do need to offer my own perspective.

In late summer of 2008, shortly after the App Store first opened for business, several ideas for possible apps began germinating. A lot of my thoughts coalesced around a word game, because they’re both entertaining and ever-popular (at the time, the developer of a crossword app was making several thousand dollars a day), and because it wouldn’t require 3D graphics, a degree of difficulty that was higher than I wanted to get into for an initial effort. I wanted a game that was somewhat unique, and I started thinking of combining several classic gameplay mechanisms into something different. Combining ideas from Boggle, Tetris, and Scrabble, TextTumble was born. The basic idea is simple: spell words with falling letter tiles.

But I needed someone to develop it, because while I dabble in code and can handle building a web site, I’m really not an expert. I started bouncing ideas off Chris Zelenak, and he immediately saw the potential in my nascent concepts and began adding the perspective of a much more experienced gamer. One of the coolest parts of the game was all Chris — the pictowords. These are tiles that have pictures on them which represent various synonyms — a picture of a cat could represent cat (obviously), tom, tiger, or puss, for example. Combining that single tile with one or more letter tiles and you can spell much longer words — and score much higher point value.

Neither of us having much experience developing games, and no experience developing for the iPhone at all, our initial timeline of a few months was quickly shot. As I said, Chris goes into much more detail on his blog. But the long and short of it is…I was not prepared for how much iteration it takes and how much time processes can take when you’re trying to make something good enough to sell. I didn’t fully think through every single point of interaction with the game before we got into development, and as a consequence we had to rebuild some things. On top of the technical and user interface challenges, I was trying to deal with all the legal and financial issues you face when you establish a new business entity, and trying to organize all those ancillary things that you need for a business to function and define some processes for us to follow.

As I learned, all that will evolve no matter what practices, tools, or tactics you try to establish, because very rarely in business is the first answer the right one. The key lies in being able to look forward and predict other possible answers and evaluate which course to take before expending too much energy on one path, and staying flexible enough that if you need to change something…you can. In our own small effort here, I have learned a great deal. I know Chris has too, and if and when we make another effort I know we’ll be able to make it happen more efficiently than before.

As it stands, we’re very proud of TextTumble 1.0. It’s something we built and it’s actually out there on the App Store! We’re confident in saying that among the 65,000 other apps in the App Store, ours rises above a good many of them in quality and complexity. That said, this is a tough nut to crack…getting noticed among sixty-five thousand applications, even though 98 or 99% of them are crap, is no small feat. We’ve submitted review requests to a number of iPhone-loving sites out there, and we hope to get a bit of traction that way in addition to spreading the word via our blogs and Twitter.

But we know we have quite a battle ahead of us. If you have an iPhone, please consider giving TextTumble a shot — and if you like it, tell your friends! We have lots of ideas and enhancements to add to TextTumble for future versions, so keep an eye out on the Magellan Media blog and let us know what you think!