I just upgraded Xcode to v4.6 (yah yah it took me long enough, we have been VERY busy all over the place.) BUT I am not ready to update all my devices to the latest iOS version (6.1 at the time of this entry) I always forget that I need to go get the previous SDK's. By far the easiest method is to simply use xcode to install them.

 

From the menu choose Xcode->Preferences and the Downloads tab. I just installed everything since we support all the way back to v4.3, actually we have v3.2 support in most of our games. I think that will change this time around. With Apple's mandate to support, among many things, iOS 6 and the new iPhone screen size (to include updates...) we can't update our older titles with adverts for our new stuff... its a 1st world dev problem... The writing was on the wall last year for a lot of this. We really slacked off on updating. I promise you we will get to it! According to analytics this will screw a couple people who play with older devices... Typically less than three in a month... I hope they forgive us! (I am sorry!!! I really am!!! Apple made me do it! Tongue out )

 

For now I wait to test the Doodle Army client against my recent server changes...


Well I a lot has happened since last update. Lets see if I can summarize.

Doodle Army 2 (DA2) has gotten a lot of attention this round. It was due. We have always had a serious hacker problem. It stems from an architecture choice made from its inception that makes hacking easy. At the inception it was easy to handle bluetooth near proximity networks, and community policed. You just walk over to the offender and knocked the device out of their hand and had words ;).  I could care less about the piracy of in app purchases. I give a lame kudo for keeping a buck or two out of my pocket per script kiddy using your hack. Its a game after all, and those purchases function within the normal expected bounds of the game experience, but what I can not abide by is people hacking to gain "1 shot" kills, infinite life, etc. That affects the positive multiplayer experience in a negative way, which effects the number of people who want to play, etc. So DA2 is getting some serious client and server tweaks as we take steps to make it annoying to hack, etc. The sad part is it ups the amount of work the servers have to do, so it actually costs us more. A downer, but that work has went well. We added some new weapons. Fixed some odd bugs (rocket launcher and map related. We had some issues integrating an ad framework into DA2, that slid us to the right several weeks.

In other great news we are still working on an Android for Doodle Army (the original) and now we are just starting a port to Windows 8. It is a matter of time before we are simply building games in an agnostic as possible fashion then porting to every platform. The days of use being a one platform pony show are coming to an end.

Zombie Road Rage is doing well enough. Not super amazing, but interesting to see how many people are still playing (about 1/15 the amount as DA2)

Flip the Bird... (Flop the Bird) Well the kids love him. We see him going free someday when we have a slow moment. Otherwise it is just underwhelming. We think we know part of the problem. It needs a tutorial, and a 

I am sure I am leaving out something interesting... In any case I better get back before someone realizes I have slipped out of my enclosure.

What I really want to do is fire up Dwarf Fortress and Tekkit (Minecraft)... But that will have to wait... There is much work to be done yet.


Here is the list of known issues we have well documented going into the v1.1.0 release:

  1. Game crashes after 2-3+ starts and quits to menu (while show story is on it happens quicker) - We are pretty certain the frequency of this crash is based on the active devices memory state (how much is in use). We need to gather more information, we have devices this does not fail on after countless attempts (well we stopped counting after 10)
  2. Turtle Gets stuck on rocks. We need to investigate this to some length. We got a sticky spot on the rock if you hit it absolutely perpendicular to the rock (tilted back).
  3. If game is started with home button on left the tilt controls are inverted. There is a workaround to this. Flip your device around till the game flips (and flip it back if desired). This 'un-confuses' the orientation state of the device.
  4. Options panel enable sound does not work if sound was toggled off on title screen: Pesky oversight on are part. We will fix it as soon as figure out what got bumped.
  5. GameCenter button does nothing (on options panel): But it should! It's probably a typo in the link to call up game center. For now we will just rely on OpenFeint for Achievement viewing.
  6. Flip in the nest is smaller than the Flip in the game once launched: it's a visual bug and super low on the priority list right now (and has been since the first commercial beta release).
  7. Custom audio levels (music and sound FX) not restored when game is restarted after being completely shutdown in device interface): You'll come back to either full on or full off audio volume settings.
  8. Enabling audio once in-game will only allow sound FX to be played, and upon return to title screen all sound is still disabled: This is a persistence bug to be worked out. Not enough to stop shipping, but clearly it is not working as designed.
  9. "Tap to Flap" hint is showing at games end when ending close to and/or near negative score.
  10. Parallax bug seen (trees popping in and out) when going reverse for some distance. It wasn't really designed to go backwards! Easy enough to fix, probably why it's not done...
  11. Second generation devices (running iOS 4.2) do not have enough memory to support the music being played in the background.

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