Making Tickle Tap Apps

 Our feature this week is from Jason Krogh of Tickle Tap Apps, who shares how this successful line of preschool apps got started. If you or your child have ever played a Tickle Tap App, you understand the quality, clarity, fun and effectiveness of their designs. An ideal role model for aspiring developers, Jason provides insight on what it took to make it happen. Toddlers never had it so good.

I love building interactive games for kids. Last year we set out with the goal of building a set of fun, inventive apps for young kids. Fast forward to today and we now have eight Tickle Tap Apps in the iTunes store. I thought this might be a good chance to share our experience.

Ten years ago I set up zinc Roe – a company dedicated to building interactive content for kids. We’ve grown slowly over time and now I lead a group of ten really talented programmers, designers, writers and artists. For us Tickle Tap Apps is a bit of a dream project. A chance to put down our typical work and build something totally new.

We gathered together our team and, starting with a blank slate, generated idea after idea for iPhone apps. And then we quickly tossed out most of them out. Eventually we settled on an eclectic mix of apps with one thing in common – they were all based on simple, focused concepts – shapes, patterns, counting, sounds, etc.

Then the real work began. We took each idea and sketched out all the screens and tried to hammer out how they would look and work. A few more of our ideas were dropped at this stage. They had sounded good, but when we tried to map them out they just didn’t come together.

Next we brought in an illustrator (the very talented Aaron Leighton) and music composer (Brian McBrearty) who looked at the ideas and brought the sound and visuals alive.

Our programmers went to work putting basic versions of the apps together, our writer worked on the voice overs, and our animator set to work on some fun character animations. Once these elements came together it was time to show the kids. This part is always scary and exciting because you never know what to expect.

We took our team, gathered together some kids and a couple of iPhones, and went to the park. We played and played and made notes of what the kids liked and didn’t like. We repeated this process in our studio and in the homes of friends, relatives, and neighbours. It was a great learning experience. And it was humbling. Some of the ideas we were so proud of just didn’t work in the hands of a four-year-old.

Making Tickle Tap Apps has been a great experience. We’ve learned so much and we love sharing our apps and our story with friends and other iPhone developers. There is a great community of people building kids content for the iPhone, from the mom developers working late at night to the big kid brands (there are even a few kids making apps themselves!). We can’t wait to see what comes next!