A new app is hoping to allow you to capture fairies at the bottom of your garden and become the next hit sensation on the iPhone.

Called Faerie Planet, the iPhone app uses a combination of regular gameplay mechanics and augmented reality to help you - or more likely your children - collect different fairies around your house.

With more than 10 fairies to collect, the app should have your kids hunting around trying to find them. To make things last a little longer than 20 minutes, you can keep only one fairy at a time.

Once you've found a fairy, you then have to catch it. For night-time fairy catching the developers have even added a torch function so you can turn on the iPhones flash to help you find those pesky sprites.

"We wanted to create a cute and fun game rather than one that involved you shooting things," Julian Graves, one of the developers on the project, told Pocket-lint.

Created by Th1ng, a London-based animation company, Faerie Planet has taken more than a year to develop and is the company's first app. That might sound daunting until you hear who the big boss on the app is. Ralph Palmer is an ex-Disney designer who has also worked at games giant EA. Previous projects include Lilo and Stitch as well as films such as Pocahontas, and looking at the graphics on Faerie Planet, it shows. This isn't some flash in the pan app with poor visuals.

The idea of the game is to catch as many fairies as you can. Doing so earns you gold (250 pieces to be precise), and that gold can then be used to buy content within the game, or send a Mysty to other friends also playing the game.

A Mysty (500 coins) is a personal message that you draw for the fairies to deliver. More gold can be bought for real cash, however at 69p for 50,0000 it isn't going to break the bank - well not unless your kids are chatty.  

As you would expect, there is Facebook integration and unlockable content to ensure you share and play.

Parents worried that the new app will mean they never see their phone again, shouldn't be. The developers have told Pocket-lint that the fairies are saved to a central account that allows you to move between devices - meaning if you've got an iPad or an iPod touch you will be able to let them carry on playing there so you can make that important call.