Mobile Orchard have posted a system for developers to provide feedback to Apple on the iPhone SDK. I like this idea. I’m positive Apple reads Mobile Orchard as they’re a well respected iPhone programming blog, so they must be aware of this feedback system and what company interested in improving their systems wouldn’t at least check out what the developers want. Everyone’s seen how excited Steve Ballmer gets about developers. I’m sure Apple feels the same way.
Now I have to decide what to spend my feedback credits on. For me a big one would be improving developer access to camera data. We NEED raw access to the camera. Think of all the amazing enhanced reality apps we could make if we could have raw access to the video feed in the 3G S. We could do cool things like meta information in museums or restaurant reviews just by pointing your camera and panning along a street to find the best restaurant on the block.
What’s really cool about how they implemented it is you get 25 votes, and you can change your mind at any time and redistribute your votes to where you’re really concerned. That’s a great way to do it.
I’ve added the ability for “Mr Rivet” to anchor onto platforms now. This is a picture after he’s grabbed onto the platform and continued falling downwards. His arm will get stretched to a breaking point, and eventually he’ll let go because his arm gets tired. So the player has to act quickly and swing up to another platform or launch upwards hopefully to grab something above where he is now.
This was pretty tricky to get right actually. It’s easy to get him to latch on, especially with Unity scripting I can send messages all over the place to find anchors and have anchors do distance checks and report potential “latch” events. However it’s hard to get him to NOT latch on when you don’t want him to. For example when you’re bouncing up to the next platform if you come close to the one above your target you don’t want to latch onto it, you just want to keep flying to your intended target. So once I figured out all those cases it turned into something pretty fun. I’m sure it still needs more tuning, and we’ll have to “art” it up, right now his arm stretching looks pretty ghetto.
I’m very excited, the lingering question of “How will I make this iPhone game not suck?” has been answered. Actual real professional artwork! Hopefully in the near future I’ll have something to post here for preliminary looks for the game.
In the meantime we will now progress towards fully fleshing out one level of gameplay (functionally and visually). Once this is done we can proceed to stage 2.
I got my regular weekly LinkedIn update today from the iPhone Developers group which often has good nuggets of information. In one of the posts I found a link to this list of iPhone developers on Twitter, as well as a Ruby script to automatically follow them all. I set up Stormtap on Twitter earlier this week under pressure from the entire Internet to increase awareness of Stormtap and get people interested in what I’m doing here. I knew I was going to have something to show this week with Mr Rivet’s prototype video, so why not get the message out.
Man if you ever want to get a lot of emails at once, follow 800+ people at once on Twitter. You’ll promptly get 800 emails of all the nice people following you back. It’s a pain to delete all the emails, but it’s nice that I’ll have more people finding out about Stormtap and hopefully make some more connections in the iPhone dev world. Those kinds of connections always pay huge dividends.
If you’d like to follow me on Twitter cause that’s your thing here’s my Twitter thingy.
Or at least that’s what I’m calling him for now. This is very early footage of the game I’m working on for the iPhone. It’s footage of the current gameplay prototype. The game is a platformer where you control a character that is essentially a cutout doll whose joints are connected by rivets. You control the character by placing your finger on the screen, dragging and then releasing. You do this in a fashion like stretching a rubber band, when you release you can picture where the rubber band would go based on how you stretched it. That’s where Mr Rivet will go too!
Right now the level he’s jumping on is all automatically generated in script. This isn’t a viable long term solution though because the logic generates impossible jumps sometimes (i.e. maybe a roating platform and moving platform synced up so that whenever you’re close enough on the moving platform the rotating platform is always tilted straight up and down). I’m sure all of the impossible situations are solvable if you’re like Einstein or something, but not if you’re me. No, for me once I am happy with all of the gameplay functionality I intend to put in I will look for an artist and together we’ll design the level looks and manually build the levels he needs to scale.
I’ve got a great deal of work to do to get the gameplay where I want it, so I better get back to it!
I just read this article that states that Apple’s considering working with the ESRB in some fashion or another to provide ESRB ratings to games on the App Store. If this happens the jig is up boys. Back to work for all us independent developers. Or back to fart apps I guess. I posted some comments on the story in my furious rage after reading it. Grrr! Go away ESRB.
You see the ESRB is a dinosaur. It costs thousands of dollars to get your game rated by them. Their processes are ancient. You need to send them VHS tapes of your gameplay footage for christ’s sake! It’s all a bunch of grandmas sitting in there going “Oh crimey that man just killed a hooker to take his money back! This is surely rated quadruple X! This will incite all of our children to hooker murdering cost saving rampages!”
I’m trying not to swear on this blog. It’s hard man.. But fuck the ESRB.
If you’re a loyal visitor to my blog and have been following my story, then I’d like to reward your curiosity with promo codes for Photo Resize and Whose Turn Is It. If you’re interested either email me at rob@stormtapstudios.com or post a comment here with a reply email address I can send it to. All I ask in return is that if you like either app show it to friends of yours with iPhones / iPod touches and maybe help spread the word some for me.
Unfortunately these codes are only for the US app store, so you’ll need to be American. Or really sneaky I guess. For Photo Resize you’ll need an iPhone, Whose Turn Is It works on either.
Yay! Whose Turn Is It? was accepted and is ready for sale on the App Store on June 6th. Hopefully the anniversary of D-Day isn’t a bad omen for its sales.
Whose Turn Is It tracks taking turns performing a task for a group of people. In very few taps you can easily track whose turn it is to pay for lunch, take out the trash or any other task worth tracking.
You can create two types of groups in Whose Turn Is It. Turn groups allow you to simply keep track of the turn, without associating difficulty or cost to the task. Turn groups are perfect for things like whose turn it is to cook dinner or rent a movie. Amount groups allow you to keep track of who spent what, ensuring a dollar amount fairness. Amount groups are best for tracking situations like who paid for lunch among work colleagues, or which roommate’s turn it is to pay the electric bill.
You can create up to 20 groups and easily scroll between them just by swiping left and right. It’s a utility app, and like most utility apps you can configure it (add or modify groups) by hitting the info button in the bottom right to flip into config mode.
On Monday I’ll start sending out promo codes to review sites. This time I think I’ll narrow it some. I think I’ll send a bunch of giveaway codes to sites that talked about my last app with the hope that word of mouth gets around and maybe lots of giveaway codes keeps it more visible. I find it unlike Gizmodo or any of the big review sites will be very interested in my small little utility app, so probably better to reward the more responsive review sites with something to give away to their readers.
Photo Resize sales have all but dried up, they were at 1 or 2 per day for awhile, but now for two days in a row zero sales. I’ve been trying to figure out why, when I found this review on the US app store:
I have no problem with customers being honest with their experiences using my software, I’ve made sports games for sports that nobody likes like Cricket for 9 years so I’m used to bad reviews. But this review is quite unfair. The app definitely sends emails, they definitely arrive at their destination. Apple has rejected my 1.1 update to Photo Resize for various reasons I’ve talked about, and I can tell from their reports that they thoroughly tested it out and used all of its functionality. I’ve had only two emails for support, and have done my best to help each person out. I’ve never heard from this Dent71 guy.
The app store has a system where you can report a concern for a review. I tried to use this system, but I get this error:
You see, I’m Canadian. I’m not allowed to do anything on the US store except browse it. After doing a bunch of googling I’ve discovered the only way I can get a US account is to find a US iTunes gift card, and enter it with a new account where I guess I pretend to be from the US somewhere. You can’t create a US account without a US source of payment (i.e. a US credit card, paypal account, whatever). If I ever needed to purchase a competitor’s product to make sure I’m making my app better than his, I’d have to jailbreak my phone if he chose not to list it on the Canadian store.
This is frustrating to be sure. I wish Apple would allow registered developers access to all the stores so we can address comments, purchase competitor’s products, etc… In the meantime I don’t have a plan for reviving Photo Resize’s sales, or dealing with this review.
I found this site which uses unmodified release dates for apps to figure out the current delay in app approval. It’s saying ~7.5 days right now, but I’m over that for Photo Resize and Whose Turn Is It. It’s only an average, so I can’t be too upset. It sucks waiting though. I’m anxious to see whether Whose Turn Is It will get much action. I’m not too sure how to market it really. I can do the same as I did for Photo Resize where I send out review requests all over the place, but I’m thinking because it’s so simple it’s unlikely reviewers would waste much time on it. They seem to stick with known brand names, weird things, anything that will bring traffic to their site.
