Meredith Cook, of MulchMedia.com, gave a great talk to the local Adobe user group meeting (PDX Adobe) here in PDX about her experiences helping make Flip the Bird. I was her colleague/wing man to handle any technical questions, but that is not what made it great. She is a thoughtful, well organized speaker, no ones time was wasted for the sake of the well organized narrative she gave. I may be biased, but her story was well received.

http://mulchmedia.com/blog/post/2013/01/08/Presentation-The-Design-Development-of-Flip-the-Bird.aspx

All the nitty gritty details (and links to the updated slide deck) can be found here on her Blog.

She did a great job, the meeting location was much improved over the closet they got stuck in last time (so I am told.) It was fantastic to meet the organizers and people in the community interested in learning and already doing this kind of thing.


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.

We were racing?!?!?! Well sort of... This 'birth' event has delayed out release slightly as to be expected when 2/3 of your project members... well... disappear to add to execute planetary population++. BUT not by too much (everyone is doing well btw) and we didn't have to cut too much out of the release to just get the good stuff we got sitting idle out. That being said another release is being planned, and we already have little tweaks going in to follow up this update (hopefully you don't find rapid releases too annoying, we did hold onto to this last effort for 3 months...)

 

The app is in review and will be available as soon as Apple approves it... Since it went ito review late last week, I am guessing sometime this week.


Sorry for the lag in getting out updates! For the few who even know we exist, follow us, and ask regularly.

We have been seriously heads down (Chad, Meredith, and myself) working on this next release. Which will officially take us out of what I call our 'commercial beta' we released and patched a couple times since Nov 2011.

We have a fix for the iOS 3.2 crash. Turns out we use a feature in 4.x that does not cause the tools in Xcode to not allow you to publish your app to support 3.x... Go figure, but we worked around it! That will be in the next release. Which will be bloody soon or a little later... See... (excuse time) I slipped my schedule some over the 2011 holidays (i.e., forcibly took a month off) and now my next kid is due to be born ANY day now (light contractions and effacing (look it up) have been had by my wife Meredith). There will be a release soon! It will be either a software release or a baby followed ASAP by a software release, you can not plan these things so close to the wire. As soon as I finish the tutorial levels to introduce all the players to every facets of game play this thing goes live (again) and we start marketing.

 

Thanks for all your help and feedback. It really has helped us make a better game because of it!

Stay tuned for a list of fixes and feature additions soon.


The Flip the Bird "You just got to 'Like' us" January winners were announced on the Facebook landing page. Go 'like' us to be automatically entered whenever we do one of these. Its that simple.

 

https://www.facebook.com/FlipTheBirdGame

 

Too much to do and to little time! There are three viable 8 hour work periods in a given day... And as much as I want to talk about work, I need to actually get some done if we are gonna get this patch out before minion 2 is born!

Soldier on blog-o-sphere!


Appsomniacs.com and CodeWorx have started working on the next Flip the Bird update... Too early to talk details (we don't even know how some of the changes will work yet exactly...) No earth shaking changes, just items that clarify the game's intent and objectives, and we really want to put some achievements in there...

We got some stuff for the web site cooking too... My friend Chris Keller of CMK Productions is making this all happen. Without him the CodeWorx web effort would be floundering due to me being spread to thin, if not just a complete flop...

Hey check out (and like) our Facebook landing page for the Flip project. http://www.facebook.com/FlipTheBirdGame

There is a contest on the Facebook landing page... like it and get into a drawing for a promo code to (use or gift) every month just for being a fan on Facebook.

I will close with a thought... I have not heard truer words... Software is never done... We have so many more projects in the queue we want to work on it boggles my mind, but I feel the need to finish this title adequately... before spreading myself even more thin...

Well I better stop muttering to myself and get to work...


CodeWorx Studios

Welcome! Satisfaction *not* guaranteed. Mileage may vary.