I remember an old coco game of years past. It was one of those old "catch the items falling from the top of the screen" arcade games, but it distinguished itself by having different items falling every level, and there were dozens of items, ranging from fish to chairs to kitchen sinks. It wasn't a very interesting game, but the little falling items gave the game a little dimension of humor as well as giving you a reason to get to the next level (to see what bitmap is next).

Perhaps do the same for jetlag. Make the player some kind of little abstract blob with eyes, and have different things as enemies each level "Level 3: Eschew the Echnidas of Ennui".

Also, you need to go back to the old DirectX Jetlag model with all of the little pickups and bonuses. The stripped-to-the-bare-essentials Jetlag really misses something over the old directx one.

One thing that I think would significantly improve the game is to use a grid finer grained than a full object size. In other words, instead of a grid that is 40*30, make the grid 80*60 and make objects 2x2. Then, scroll at the rate of 1 cell per unit time as you do now (doubling the update frequency to keep the same overall speed). That would give everything a much better sense of motion and make the game feel less random and more skill-based (which is much less frustrating IMO).

Next, you could always use simple graphical icons to make it more appealing - a spaceship dodging asteroids, or a bike dodging pedestrians, or a skier dodging trees(skifree, anybody?). There are plenty of possibilities, and you could even include multiple themes to allow players to pick their favorite one.

If you want to get really fancy, use the tilt sensor to control the speed in some way. You could also add all kinds of mechanics to spice up the game, but the above should be relatively simple to implement and would be a significant improvement.

Another thing you might want to consider is the spacing of the obstacles. If they're completely random as in the &#106avascript version, there isn't really any kind of difficulty control and some parts will be randomly very hard or very easy depending on how the obstacles end up spaced. On the other hand, if you use a non-uniform distribution based on some reasoned criteria, you might be able to present a more enjoyable progression of difficulty. For example, instead of randomly placing the obstacle on each line, use an Poisson distribution to determine the distance an obstacle should be from the previous obstacle to make obstacles start out fairly clustered (or fairly far apart from each other, whichever is easier to play with) and vary the parameters over time so things become more difficult.

maybe you can talk to turt to convince him to let him use some of his puzzle blocks in jetlag?

A quick google search says the iPhone has a 480 by 320 resolution screen. You said the iPhone version of JetLag would be 30 by 20 blocks. That's only 16 by 16 pixels; how hard could that be to make? If you're only needing 50 or so different objects, couldn't you knock them out in a few hours? Even if you needed 200 or so tiles, they are only 16*16.

If you want original art, just list what you need in your next journal entry, and ask GDNetters to make them for you. I'd be glad contribute some time to make a few.

On a aside, I love JetLag, as do my siblings. When I recently reformatted my old PC, JetLag and Griffen Legends(Another GDNet Showcaser) was one of the few things I made sure to save. (I also had about 4gbs of family photos my mom had on there... that's what took the most time to transfer)