Wow...Really!?

I'm now seeing that it has been quite some time I've written. And here I was hoping that I would write at least once every other week. Who knew that it take time to actually write?

Here's the long and short of it. Seth and I were working diligently on getting those finally elements into Oh! Gnomes!. In fact, Seth had parachutes and the dynamically difficulty working pretty well. And then something tragic happened. Seth updated the Unity package to include my work regarding bushes and his weeks of work disappeared. Ok. So it's not the most tragic event in the world. But I'm sure anybody that has lost that amount of work can attest to, it certainly does take the wind out of one's sails. But we're back and running. I think we're all looking forward to polishing the final bits on Oh! Gnomes! (especially when Unity 3.5 releases).

In the mean time, Karl has been working through the cards for Ghost. They progressively get better and better with each card. I keep joking with him that he'll have to go back and revisit the first couple cards now that he found the art style. But then those cards will be better than the later cards and he'll have to revisit those cards...and he'll be trapped in an infinite loop of making it better. Seriously though, he's only got about 3 more cards to make and then he's onto modeling the players and ghosts.

While he's been doing that, I've been continuing on making the board game solid. I got it to a pretty solid working state and played it with various folk. And the more I played it, the more I realized that it wasn't quite the game that I was intending to design. It played alright, yet it was horribly chaotic (the same way Ghost Stories is chaotic). This forced the lot of us to sit down and reevaluate the player-loop. Needless to say, it received a massive restructuring. We went from an action-point system (different actions had different costs) to a phase-based system. This made the game far more accessible, requiring the player to only think about 1 action at a time. Additionally we introduced room effects making some rooms more or less desirable than others. There are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but even in its horribly broken state, it already feels significantly better. Of course, all of the restructuring code have been avoided if I would have just made a paper prototype to start with...sigh...I should know better.

Alright. I think that's it.

Augmented Reality is Just Plain Cool

We're continuing to go back-and-forth with Apple. Gotta love when you can play the game on our devices but nobody else can. Well...while we've been waiting, we decided to bring back augmented reality (AR) for Oh! Gnomes! For those of you that aren't familiar with AR, it is the idea of virtual images being superimposed on actual reality. With Oh! Gnomes!, the player points his Android at an image on the table and instead of the camera being constrained to a fixed orbit around the Groundling, the player can move the camera upwards-and-downwards, and inwards-and-outwards, and sidewards. It's kinda like a Wonka-vator. Anyway, we're hoping to have something here shortly for our Android enabled users.

And while we aren't adding new features to Oh! Gnomes!, we are continuing our work on Ghost. There is something strangely satisfying about rolling dice. Even if they are virtual dice. Karl is creating some beautiful cards for the ghosts and players. Once we get our final player cards, I'll post them and share the pretty.

Xcode > Devil

First, the good news: Oh! Gnomes! has been submitted to iTunes Connect for approval.

The bad news: it took a week to get it to that point, and will probably find out if we've been approved or not early next week. Hopefully we'll be approved this first time because I don't want to have to jump through all of those hoops again.

It all started when Xcode version 3.x we were running, and a old version of iOS on the iPod we were using to test were not compatible. To be able to push a build to the device to test, I had to update the iPod to the latest version of iOS (v 4.3.2). That updated it too far ahead of the version of Xcode we were running and we still couldn't push a test build to the device. So, we updated Xcode to version 4.0.2, but our project didn't update correctly. We had to go through all the pain of resetting up our project again, with the added difficulty of a completely new and unfamiliar Xcode interface. We got the build onto the device, tested it out and found that everything was running smoothly. Hooray! Now we can submit to Apple! The hard part is over! Right? . . .  WRONG!!

Apple provides documentation with the steps needed to build a distribution build, unfortunately they have not been updated to reflect the major changes they made to the user interface for the latest version of  Xcode. First, we had to generate a new Certificate Signing Request so we could create and download a new iOS Distribution Certificate. Next, we had to create and download a new iOS Distribution Provisioning Profile. Now we can make a build, right? Well, almost. We still needed to set up Xcode to do the distribution build, and that's where things got a lot more difficult. Turns out, you also need an App ID, so we had to go back and set that up and do a new Unity build to incorporate it. The directions didn't match the current interface, we couldn't find anything making it almost impossible to set up to build for distribution. After asking the all mighty Google, we got it all set up and built.

YAY! Almost done! We logged into iTunes Connect, filled out all the tax and banking info, the app info, uploaded screen shots for iPhone/iPod and iPad, set the price. All done, now lets upload! Er... where/how do you upload your app? Re-read all the instructions, nothing. Look over the app info page looking for an upload button, nothing. Back to the all mighty Google. Turns out we needed to download the App Loader program so we could upload our app. Of course you need a special program to upload your app to iTunes Connect for approval. It's so obvious. Why didn't we think of that?

After much pulling of hair, gnashing of teeth, and most of a Saturday, we finished the submission process. Now, our app is in limbo, waiting for approval. Hopefully we'll hear back in a few days.

In the mean time, here are a couple of teasers.

 

UPDATE: Because of a new issue with Unity for iOS and the latest iOS SDK 4.3, we may be automatically bounced. Lets hope that doesn't happen.

Dear Unity iOS Developers,

Unfortunately, many (and probably all) Unity iOS applications built with iOS SDK 4.3 are crashing during the App Store Review process while still running successfully on developer's devices. We have contacted Apple regarding this issue and received confirmation that this is of highest priority to them. Our iOS team is working on a solution as well, but due to complex nature of the problem it will take longer than expected to properly resolve. A currently known workaround is to keep using iOS SDK 4.2.

Many users reported that applications built with Xcode 3.2.5 + iOS SDK 4.2 successfully pass the Apple App Store review process currently. OS SDK 4.2  is not publicly available on the iOS Developer site anymore, but it still can be downloaded via direct link. We want to assure you that building final applications with iOS SDK 4.2 provides all the features the Unity iOS run-time supports and is proven to work fine with devices running older generation iOS (3.x-4.2.x) as well as the newer devices running iOS 4.3.x (like iPad 2).

Please feel free to contact us if you have issues releasing your application to the App Store.

Regards,

The Unity Team

Xcode = Devil

To all that bought the Android version of the game, thank you very much. And please, send us your feedback, we want to make the game better for you. In fact, we pushed a new build to Marketplace today because of a couple requests; and it's a lot better because of them.

To all that are waiting for the iOS release, again, we are working on it. We are working on it despite Xcode's hatred of us. We had Unity and Facebook integrated beautifully once upon a time. But because we decided we Xcode didn't hate us enough, we upgraded to Unity 3.3. Doing so broke our integration. Now we have to do it all again. So...you know, that's fun. Theoretically, we should be done by the end of the week. ...Then we can fight with App Store.

They're Here!

For those of you that are Android users, Oh! Gnomes! has been released to Android Marketplace! Go check it out here!

For those of you that are iPhone/iPod/iPad users, ...we're working on it.

Soon!

The gnomes are coming!

Three Guys, a Girl, and a Groundling Shop

It's been some time. Certainly far too long. I have no excuse other than laziness...and I've been distracted. Mostly laziness. ...No wait, I've actually been really busy. Between instructing courses in Game Studies/Development and working towards cert for a AAA title, I've been working on Gnome. Yes. Gnome. Actually, it is now known as ...

Oh! Gnomes!

I must say, Seth has been a life saver for this game. He has done all sorts of crazy things. Most importantly, he interfaced Unity (iOS and Android) with Facebook so that players will be able to post their scores to their walls. When he and I were developing it and we kept IMing scores back and forth to each other, it quickly became apparent that having such a feature would be absolutely necessary. He also made Gnome work via Augmented Reality. It is so much fun to play. Absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, we (meaning he) could never get the FPS to an appropriate level. The best I heard was anywhere between 20-25 FPS, which just isn't good enough. And to top it all off, he performed several user tests. We could figure out what worked and what didn't. In fact, we removed 2 gnomes from the list because of it. They just weren't fun.

And Karl stepped up to the plate for the team. He was busy working on Art assets for Ghost (splitting a small team is not recommended), but when I asked him for a little help, he modeled and animated the Groundling and environment. And in Blender no less. Invaluable.

Last but certainly not least, Denise, a programmer, looked at the team and said "We have enough programmers. I'll be an artist!" Ok. So maybe they weren't exactly those words, but the intent was certainly the same. She created the GUI assets, modeled and animated the gnomes, and had many valuable insights into Unity. This game could not have been made without her.

Why am I using the past tense for Gnome? Because the game is almost done. We are putting on the final touches and squashing those final bugs. In hindsight, I feel we should have written about the process while in the thick of it. But I guess that's the glory of hindsight. So yeah...

So Many Gnomes!

So many gnomes! Let me say that one more time...So many gnomes! We've been working on Gnome for quite some time now. There are 2 interactions: Touch and Throw. And there are 3 gnomes for each interaction. Touch has Squish (touch and it dies), Explode (touch and it dies - and it kills all other gnomes around it), and Spawn (touch and it dies - and it spawns 2 gnomes at its position). Throw has Fling (throw and it dies when it collides with the ground), Target (throw and it dies when it collides with the Groundling), and Chemical (throw and it dies when it collides with another Chemical gnome - it kills all other gnomes around it).

If anybody has any suggestions for additional interactions or gnomes, please post a comment. I am interested in hearing what people have to say.

Also for each interaction, there is an interaction icon around their feet. - And it works out really well. Before these "affordance" icons were added, when a new gnomes was added into the mix (gnomes are added incrementally - starting with the basic gnomes and adding a new type after the player has killed some many gnomes), players were confused about how to interact with the new type. However, with the "affordance" icons, the game communicates appropriate interactions. To help with this training, players can interact with the Squish and Fling gnomes during the menu screen. This feature was, of course, an accident. But is certainly the best accident Gnome has experienced. I had a play-tester play with the gnomes in the menu for about 2 minutes before starting the game. - He did quite well.

We are working on getting animations from Blender into Unity (if anybody has a better clue than me, please let me know). We are working on being able to post the player's high scores to their Facebook page - this feature is so that friends can compare scores. You know, adding social play element to the game. Yep...That's it. So many gnomes!

If anybody has any ideas for the name of the game, again I want to hear them.

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost

First, I thought that I would share some of the ghost images...


Secondly, things are not going nearly as well as I wanted them to be going. Not because I don't want them to be but by the fact that I was one of the few individuals that recently got laid off at High Voltage Software. In a moment of absolute panic, another project was started. It was conceived by my wife (she is much better at "cute" games than I am). But from that initial spark of an idea, the design is a quick and simple game for the iPhone. Here's hoping Gnome is successful.

There are 4 degrees of difficulty, the game shows the groundling. For EASY, the groundling is wearing a diaper. For NORMAL, the groundling appears as normal. For HARD, the groundling is wearing chest plate mail. For INSANE, the groundling is shown wearing...something...I don't exactly know. If anybody has any suggestions for it, then I would love to hear your ideas.

...With any luck, the next post will be a plea for people to go purchase Gnome (And I'll even explain the game).

p.s. I did find a contract position as a technical designer at Day 1 Studios. I'll be working on FEAR3. - I'm excited.