@Dunc - thanks! :) We played with the controls a bit - the path and scrolling maps were in there right at the start, but we originally had the doggy waiting until the path was complete before running... it seemed a bit strategic'ish for a 5 minute game, so we changed him to run all the time. It was fun watching people of different ages pick it up and just play their way - some would draw paths, others would finger-herd.
Also, we originally prototyped in other stuff... then used Oolong (c/c++) to get up and going with a proper application framework, coded our own opengl render system, sprites, input, geometry and collision, etc (along with the ai/flocking) and actually did start messing with sound enginey stuff in openal as well. I gave that up pretty fast as it was a bit of a minefield and a complete no-brainer to use CocosDenshion. We then switched from Oolong textures (pvrtc-based) to Texture2D in our sprites for better alpha support - we ended up using a Cocos wrapper of Texture2D, but none of the Cocos sprite features apart from the loader. At this point we saw Herd-O-Cows get released (yes, aaages ago) and then a few others, but Top Dog was a bit of fun and learning for our studio so it didn't matter too much :) Obviously, we didn't have time to install lasers onto our sheep like another recent release!
As mentioned at the top of this thread, I think for our next 2d game prototypes we'll be using Cocos from the ground up! It was quite a learning process (as I'm sure it is for plenty of other devs) and choosing a framework back when we started wasn't easy. The new versions of Cocos seem to be coming along really nicely and we've got plenty of Flash/Box2d experience so most of the concepts make sense. It's slightly hard to keep up with all the changes, docs, 'best practice', external tools, etc but I guess I'll pony up and learn some more obj-c when our other project work allows :)
We're looking forward to getting some updates out, too. The only criticism we've really had so far is not enough levels!, so along with the leaderboard stuff we're working on that and some other little gems.
Without giving your game ideas away(!), please feel free to email us with any feedback: topdog@flightless.co.nz, and good luck with your game - email us when it's out!