Cycle through subviews in main viewcontroller

Was having a hard time exactly framing the question, in essence i want to recreate the uitabbar functionality but with a custom tab bar with more buttons then the four allowed before they get grouped into the more. i coudln't figure it out in storyboards so what i ended up doing was creating an instance for each of the other viewcontrollers in the main viewcontroller file. I made the uibuttons when pressed add a subview to the view of the main view controller. All the subviews are loading fine and my desiered functionality is working atleast in displaying the views in the size that i want each to be, but im afraid that by doing it this way when i press the button to jump to another view, the instance for the current subview will get released and stop the process happening in that view. What would you guys suggest as a better way to go about this. Thanks MR family.