There's a Swedish iOS game developer that's quite successful as well, Toca Boca. They're doing games for the small ones and as a father of two I have every single game they've developed on my iPads. Quality work that sits well with my kids.
One of my favorite games as well. Pleasantly surprised when there was a Swedish iOS app for kids with similar concepts, Pettson och Findus uppfinningar, that my five year old nephew showed me.
It's maintained by an indie game studio called Two Lives Left (http://twolivesleft.com), which produced the excellent Cargo-Bot game -- and for that matter, let him get a feel of programming with the latter.
I know a few of these guys personally. They started making iphone games but lately their success has been garnering them contracts with local businesses to make internal iphone applications. You might want to get in contact with them.
Speaking about games for children, have you seen http://www.fungooms.com ? In my opinion they are the best and sadlymthe author didn't raise emough backers in kickstartermfor an iOS amd Android port.
I launched my first small mobile game this year! [1]
I recently started my next game which is a story-based platformer. It will be tiny/small and it's hard not to think it will not be enough, but this post has confirmed for me that small is ok, if not better. Thanks!
This little flash game has very high production values for artwork, music, and sound. In fact, I think its quality is on a par with anything Apple ever did. The interface would be a natural for a touch interface like the iPad.
There are many Flash games of comparable quality. It is a shame that such excellence will never be allowed on the iPad under the current policy.
How to kill off Flash using Market Forces
If I were Apple, I would develop a toolset to convert flash apps to an iPad compatible target along with an outreach program to encourage the migration of such apps to the iPad and the Apple App Store. If HTML5 is not robust enough, then Apple should develop a target based on Javascript or other advanced VM, taking care to ensure that a subset of the target is nearly isomorphic to Flash/Actionscript. This could be done defensibly by drawing on prior art in programming languages, and a near 1 to 1 correspondence would make most of the conversion work possible through automated translation. As a standard, HTML5 is in a better position to be the target, however.
License such an SDK stipulating that the app and its derivative works can only be published on web sites in a manner which is compatible with Mobile Safari.
The effect of such a program would be to harness a profit motive towards killing off Flash! Using such a carrot is going to work better than the stick of legal action. The latter has the side effect of making many developers like Apple and the App Store less. The former would be an opportunity to reach more users and make more money.
You can catch more flies using honey than vinegar. You can kill more of them that way as well.
I launched a cool iPad game: http://chopperdefense.com/. Already have a few "paying customers" and even more Cydia freeloaders :) Now working on getting the word out and on a major update that would also bring it to iPhone, hopefully.
My 9yo was absolutely thrilled to find an app on iOS with a similar concept to this - I believe it's https://www.draw-your-game.com/. He's thoroughly familiar with ScratchJr so he's already making games there, but I don't think he's quite ready for me to stick him in front of Unity just yet.
Good on the dev for doing something in this space, it'll be appreciated.
I recently released my first game on Android, very much a commercial endeavor but with a model that I somewhat expected too friendly for its own good - ad-free demo, single IAP for the full game. It made $10k over the first month and so far it seems to be still accelerating. I'm yet to release on iOS, I expected the Android port to be a drop in the bucket but this is going to go a long way in sustaining me as an indie game dev.
It was my first venture into iOS development, and I used it as a learning tool. The idea was one I had for awhile: to blend two cool games.
It gets about 1-10 downloads a day. I never did any marketing. I was quite naive in my thinking; it's almost as if I had to make that mistake to fully grasp it though.
If your cousins have iOS devices they should check out Hopscotch. (http://gethopscotch.com) It works on iPhone and iPad and you can use it to learn to code and make your own games.
Full disclosure: I founded Hopscotch. But it's still awesome if I do say so myself :)
We have some tutorials that may be helpful if you want to make iOS games at https://www.makegameswith.us/tutorials/learn/. They guide you through learning Obj-C, Cocos2D (a game engine for 2D games), building an iOS version of Conway's Game of Life, and then cloning Angry Birds.
http://tocaboca.com
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