[vannevar]

I wrote a game with a friend early on for the App Store. I second the notion of validation. It's great you have a friend who can design graphics for the game, but prototype and test the basic mechanics before you get too wrapped up in the appearance. Using simple placeholders will speed up your iteration as you refine the mechanics. I spent a lot of time writing a vector graphics layer (this was in the days of iOS 2), and while it was very cool, it took a lot of time that could probably have been better spent trying experiments with the basic gameplay. The game was not a big success.