I have come across a lot of obscure error messages spat out by compilers and assemblers throughout my career as a coder but yesterday I met the best. XCode 3.1 decided to let me know that I had forgotten to flesh out a member function prototype by simply displaying the error message ‘Possible candidates are’ and then the name of the function. It didn’t take long to discover why I was getting this message and to correct it but that has to rank as one of the most obscure error messages. Kudos for almost solving the error but it would have been more useful to tell me there was an error and then post this message.
Xiotex Studios is my own business but during the day (and most of the night for the last few weeks) I work for a company called Introversion on a game called Multiwinia. I am described as senior coder for this company but I think that’s because I am older than all of them rather than some description of ability 
A while back the marketing department asked me to make a small Flash game in my spare time to help promote Multiwinia and I agreed to it. You can take a look at this work in progress here. So in all this means that I am working on 4 games at the same time. The other 2 are another iPhone game and a small competition game for a friend of mine - all this while pulling crunch on Multiwinia.
I must be mad.
It’s very early days yet but I have decided to add a forum to this site. You can find it at http://www.xiotexstudios.com/Forums
At the moment it has one topic and that is iPhone game development. I am using phpBB3 with a existing template but I must admit I am finding this template confusing so it is likely to change.
One of the games I was going to make for the WiiWare platform before the whole ‘rejection’ by Nintendo thing happened (in case you missed it) was a gravity based game that was going to make use of accelerometers on the Wii. However, Nintendo don’t want me and having just just released a small game on the iPhone I am now familiar with the development and publishing process so I can get on and start to make the ‘proper’ games I always intended to do so the next title is the game that was originally intended for WiiWare. At the same time I am developing my iPhone game engine further and I may just be giving away copies of that here in the attempt to help other new iPhone developers.
More details about the project and screenshots to come.
At last my first iPhone game is on sale!
Find it here
So, Spore Galactic Edition arrived this morning through the post. I quickly unwrapped it, through the disk in the drive and installed it. 17 mins later I can launch it. The first thing it asks you for is the serial code so I entered that and then I am treated to a nice Maxis animation and the Spore main menu appears. I then create an account, wait and then a message appears telling me that Spore is unable to verify my activation code so all online privileges have been removed.
WTF!?!
I try again - same results.
Eventually I give up and give EA a call and guess what - the Spore Servers have fallen over and they should be back up and running in 5 hours time. Way to go EA! What’s more you go onto their support forums and there are a lot of people in the same situation.
Edit:
Just got an email from EA over this:
“Thank you for contacting us here at Electronic Arts Customer Support.
We deeply apologise for the inconvenience that you are currently experiencing with SPORE. It appears that there is an ongoing issue with the accounts server and the registration process for the game. We would like to inform you that we are already investigating this concern and in the process of resolving this issue. For updates with regards this concern, you can visit the SPORE site at http://www.spore.com.
We appreciate your continued patience and understanding in the meantime.”
******* UPDATE **********
The Spore servers are now online
I finally got an email from Apple this morning informing me that my first iPhone game has moved into the ‘ready for sale’ status. When I went to take a look at this in iTunes connect I noticed that iTunes connect has had an upgrade and I must admit the signs are looking good so Apple are obviously aware of the issues and doing something about it - it just ‘feels’ like we aren’t being listened to.
Now all I have to do is wait till the actual game appears on iTunes.
I don’t usually go in for ‘life coaches’ of self help stuff because I generally find that most of what they preach is common sense. However a couple of years ago (wow - has it really been that long?) a colleague of mine at Lionhead Studios put me onto Steve Pavlina. Now, while I find some of his work a little too far out for my tastes a lot of what he says is genuinely helpful and gels with my viewpoint of life in general. So when he announced his book I pre-ordered it on Amazon. Then he posted a blog entry calling for potential reviewers of his book and I jumped at it again. Today I got an email from him which said:
“Suffice it to say that you’ve qualified to receive a review copy, and I
forwarded your info to Hay House.”
So - YAY I get to read his book early and post a review which you will find here as soon as it arrives and I have read it.
You can get more info about it here:
Steve Pavlina’s call to arms
The whole concept of life coaching and self help systems is a fascinating one and I wonder why it is so popular and so lucrative. My personal theory is that in some ways having somebody telling you how to live your life and giving you some answers about how to achieve something is a bit like removing part of the responsibility from yourself to achieve what you always could achieve. In a way almost going back to early childhood where your parent role models insulated you from the nastiness of the world and kept you in a safe cocoon of a sheltered life. So when we finally reach the stage where we have to fend for ourselves it leaves a hole that some replace with Religion, others with socializing and yet more with Life coaches. But then again I may just be spouting crap.
My iPhone game remains in the Itunes Connect ‘review’ status. Last time it took them a week to find what they classify as a bug. I have heard from other developers that they got refused on items like version numbers not being matched in the games .plist file. While it is understandable that they want all the information to be complete I think the review process should be a dialogue between the developer and Apple rather than the opaque process they currently have in place. My main worry is that the halt the process on the first bug they find rather than compile a list of bugs to give to the developer to fix before the game goes into the next review stage. Imagine the worse scenario, i.e. that you have n bugs that means at this rate you would have n weeks of review. I have heard the argument that it’s up to the developer to make sure that their games are bug free. In the case of the actual code then I agree but when it comes down to Apple’s requirements for the game the documentation is not all that clear about what ‘has’ to be done so the developer can honestly believe that their application is complete when they submit. Another annoying aspect of this is that if you go onto the app store at the moment there are plenty of apps on there where the comments are full of ‘it crashes the iPhone’ or ‘it doesn’t work’ - how did these apps pass the review stage?
So how can Apple make this process easier for the developer and themselves?
when you supply your application to the app store you should get assigned an account manager and this is somebody you can contact in relation to your application. Now this may seem like an over-kill but look at it this way. Apple are probably swamped with games currently going through the review process and by making the review process a dialogue with a consistent person Apple can reduce their workload of apps waiting to be reviewed. The argument for this is that not all bugs should be classified the same. A simple art change bug can be fixed in moments by the developer so the account manager can inform the developer of the issue, the developer fixes it and the account manager continues from where they left off. At the moment it appears that you get informed of the bug, you fix it and then submit your app to be reviewed and the process starts from the beginning again with somebody else. If however if it is a major bug like a crash bug then I would argue that is a strong case of putting the app through the review process again.
Apple could make the whole process a little more transparent by supplying more information on the app status page other than a coloured ‘light’ and a word. It says the game is in review but it doesn’t give an estimated time to completion or anything else that is useful - at the moment the developer really does feel left in the cold to wonder if Apple are actually doing anything. If it’s in a queue then show its queue number - something to give more feedback about what is happening.
On the whole Apple have done a better job than I expected and this is their first generation of the process and I am sure that it will get better but for the moment it’s very painful and not at all clear enough for the developers out here trying to make a living and add value to an already fantastic product.
Is anybody else going through this process at the moment and would like to share your experience of it? Perhaps your experience is better than mine and a few other developers I have spoken to?
My first ever Flash game Survival factor hit a bit of a milestone over the weekend. It has been played more than 30,000 times now. What’s odd about this though is for the last 6 months the game has been played something along the region of maximum 20 times a day and all of a sudden it is being played nearly 4000 times a day now. Unfortunately I have no way of tracking where it is being played so if you spot it out there in the wilds then let me know where
