untoldentertainment.com » iPhone

It’s Not Piracy – It’s Free-to-Play

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:47:11 +0000

i don’t want to chime in on this SOPA/PIPA stuff and sound ill-informed, alarmist, and adolescent like many of the current commentators do. (“SOPA is BAD because i can’t pirate movies any more … er … i mean, because it takes away my freedom!“)

Who do you think you are – William Wallace?

The truth is that i Am Not A Lawyer, and neither are you, and that makes us (and most laypeople) incapable of reading and comprehending legislation and bill proposals and legalese. We need our lawyer friends to do that for us, and since lawyers burn money to heat their homes, we have to put up with understanding these proposed bills with second-hand, filtered, and often distorted information.

Obama’s new health care plan will boil elderly people down for craft paste!!

As a lawyer friend of mine put it to me recently, anyone who does possess the skill and interest to read a bill like SOPA also brings with him an agenda, so you need to crank your bullshit filter up to High Alert (those last few were my words, not his. And, charitably, he didn’t charge me for his words.)

POPE-A

i liken the way we’ve heard about SOPA and PIPA to the way medieval peasants experienced the Bible. They were illiterate, and Mass was in Latin, so they relied on the liturgy to be retold to them after church let out, in the town square. As i tell my daughters: whenever you hear anything, think to yourself “Who’s speaking? Why are they saying what they’re saying? And what do they stand to gain or lose by communicating it to me?”

It may sound like a cynical attitude, but hey – welcome to the postmodern age. (Also: get stuffed, Disney copyright)

A bit of what drives me nuts about the current lay “discourse” on SOPA is the standard weaselly excuses people make to protect their ability to steal media. And i will call it stealing, for now, because that’s what it is … taking for-sale or protected goods without paying for them is called “theft”, or “stealing”. i’m not going to argue that. What i will suggest though, as i did to my lawyer friend, is that people constantly push against the boundaries of law in ways that, once the scale tips, those once prohibited behaviours become legally permissible.

There oughta be a law.

Here’s a short list of things you couldn’t legally do a few years back, and can now do thanks to enough people bumping against the boundaries long and hard enough:

- fellate someone (oral sex was decriminalized in Alaska in 1971. True.)
- marry someone of the same sex (boundaries are still being pushed on this one, as you well know)
- sit at the front of the bus if you’re black
- vote if you’re a woman

(the key difference here is that these laws are all about people, whereas copyright and piracy are about ideas and things … and it’s offensive to many of us that theft of ideas and damage to things can be punished as much as or more severely than damage to people)

With that key distinction made, digital piracy is another example of people pushing up against the limits of law, and in great enough numbers, that the law will eventually have to change to meet the demands and desires of the people. There’s a very interesting parallel between video game consumption and linear media consumption. Games can be pirated just like movies, music and teevee shows can. But the gaming industry is younger and more nimble than “Old Media”, and is constantly exploring new revenue models, because the game industry (perhaps uniquely) realizes it needs to Adapt or Die.

Adapt or Die! Or Skate!

F2P via P2P

Free-to-play is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where players were being forced to pay a high price – $60 for maybe 20 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the game, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the disc at a Buy-And-Sell shop (about which the industry complained bitterly).

But now there’s this free-to-play model. The game is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you play as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the game, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: new weapons, different levels, and snazzy hats. The hope of the game developers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the game’s development costs. Good games float to the forefront, and the best developers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

Introducing Free-to-Watch

Now, think about people who pirate movies, and check this out:

Free-to-watch is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where audiences were being forced to pay a high price – $20 for maybe 2 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the movie, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the DVD at a Buy-And-Sell shop.

But now there’s this free-to-watch model. The movie is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you watch it as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the movie, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: the big-screen theatre experience, film festival premiers with actors and directors in attendance, 3D glasses, DVD extras, and a physical product that they can touch and display on a shelf. The hope of the film-makers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the movie’s development costs. Good movies float to the forefront, and the best film-makers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

Oh yes they’re couuusins, identical couuusins …

If movie studios were less entrenched and more willing to try new things like the game industry does, it’s possible that this whole concept of piracy would fly out the window. Laws would be changed, and “piracy” would be seen for what it really is: the agile, forward-thinking film industry’s experiment with their pioneering free-to-watch monetization model.

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 5)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:54:38 +0000

This is the fifth part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

Distribution Certificate

Now that you’ve tested your app and it’s to your liking, guess you want to put it up on the App Store? Never fear, my friend! I will now show you how to get your app uploaded on the App Store so the whole world can ignore it and buy Angry Birds instead.

This process of distribution is a bittersweet one. It’s sweet because it’s extremely similar to the development process that you just went through, so you should be familiar with the convoluted certificates and hoops you have to jump through at Apple’s pleasure. It’s bitter because it’s extremely similar to the development process that you just went through.

Something about this seems awfully familiar …

Enough talk. Let’s get cracking!

Generate a Signing Certificate Request

Remember that OpenSSL program that you installed in Part 2 of this tutorial? You have to open that bad boy up again to create another Certificate Signing Request. Now, it is possible to just use your old Signing Certificate – however, just to be super clear and to avoid any confusion or difficulty, we’re going to create another one.

Note: We’ll use this new Signing Certificate Request to get a Distribution Certificate rather than a Development Certificate.

Open a command prompt window. You can do this by clicking the Windows Start button and typing in cmd in the search field. Alternately, you can also hold the Windows key on your keyboard and hit the “R” key (for “Run”), then type cmd and hit Enter.
Once you are in the command prompt, navigate to your Open SSL bin folder. Depending on where you installed it, you will have to navigate to a different path than in this example. (i hope you installed Open SSL in a location that you can remember!) Check Part 2 if you need a refresher on Windows CLI (Command Line Interpreter) commands.
Punch this command into the CLI and hit the ENTER key when you’re finished:
```
openssl genrsa -out mykey.key 2048
```
You should see this response:
Next, type (or highlight the line, right-click, choose “Copy”, and right-click/”Paste” in the CLI):
```
openssl req -new -key mykey.key -out CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest  -subj "/emailAddress=yourAddress@example.com, CN=John Doe, C=US"
```
Now, before you hit ENTER you’ll want to edit a couple of things. First, replace “John Doe” with your own name or company name. Then replace the “yourAddress@example.com” email with your own email. Press ENTER.

You should get a message similar to this:

You just generated the Signing Certificate Request file that you’ll use to ask Apple for your Distribution Signing Certificate. The Signing Certificate Request file is located in the bin folder of your Open SSL install. It has a .certSigningRequest file extension and should look like this:

Obtain a Signing Certificate for Distribution

You have to upload your Signing Certificate Request file to the Apple Provisioning Portal to get your Distribution Signing Certificate. Onward.

Note: There have been instances where this upload does not work with Google Chrome. Just to be safe, use another browser like Firefox.

Navigate to the Apple iOS Provisioning Portal within the Dev Center.
Log in with your developer account and click on Certificates.
Click on the Distribution tab.

Note: In our previous tutorials, you requested a certificate from the Development tab. An app signed with a Development certificate cannot be successfully submitted to the Apple App Store.

If you have an old Distribution Certificate because you’ve made a prior app, and you’d still like to follow along, you can go ahead and Revoke it. Revoking the Certificate will not affect your apps that are already on the App Store, because the Certificate is primarily used during the upload process so that Apple can identify you.

Note: I recommend revoking an existing Certificate because Apple seems to issue only one Certificate per Team Agent. You must revoke any existing Certificate to be able to request another. Why is it set up like this? I have no idea.
If you don’t have a pre-existing Distribution Signing Certificate, you can just go ahead and click Request Certificate.

On the next screen, you will upload the Signing Certificate Request file that you generated in the previous section.
Click the Browse button and navigate to the OpenSSL bin folder.
Select the Signing Certificate Request file and click Submit. When you are finished, you’ll see your Distribution Signing Certificate ready to download from the web page.

Don’t download your Distribution Certificate quite yet. You still need to create an App ID and a Mobile Provisioning Profile.

Create a New App ID

When deciding what you want your App ID to be, you have two choices:

Create an entirely new App ID
Use the Existing App ID that you create in Part 2

If you want to use your existing App ID, then just skip to the next section. If for some reason you don’t like the name of your App ID, go ahead and make a new App ID, following the steps outlined in Part 2.

Create a Mobile Provisioning Profile for Distribution

Now that you have an App ID, you can create your Mobile Provisioning Profile.

Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
Click the Distribution tab.

In previous tutorials, you created a Development profile for testing. You won’t be able to upload your app to the Apple App Store unless you create a Distribution profile, so make sure you select the correct tab.

You can either create a new Provisioning Profile, or modify an existing one. Modifying an existing profile if you want to switch between App Store and Ad Hoc distribution. If you’ve never created a Distribution profile, read on. Instructions for modifying a profile are in the section following.
Click on New Profile.

Note: You’ll only see this option if you are the fee-paying Team Admin.
In the next section, you’ll have to fill out a bunch of options. The first option is the Distribution Method. As you can see, you can choose between App Store and Ad Hoc.
- Choose App Store if you are completely satisfied with your app and you want to submit it to Apple for review. If all goes well, then your app will be released whenever Apple deems it worthy.
- The Ad Hoc option can be thought of as a closed beta for your app. When you choose Ad Hoc, you are able to release your app to a maximum of 100 people, and only they will have access to it. Your App will NOT appear in the public App Store if you choose Ad Hoc.
Note: Notice when you choose App Store, the “Devices” option is greyed out. When you choose Ad Hoc, it allows you to choose a number of devices that you have registered. The App Store option releases your app on the public App Store, so it doesn’t make sense to target specific devices.
Your Profile Name is the name that you want for your Provisioning Profile. The Distribution Certificate that you created should be visible here.
Finally, you have to choose which App ID with which you want to register your Provisioning Profile.
Click Submit.
You should ee a list of the Provisioning Profiles that you’ve created. Click download on the Provisioning Profile that you just created, and save it to you computer.

Modify your Provisioning Profile

Note: If you’re not modifying an existing Provisioning Profile (say, from Ad Hoc to App Store), skip over this section.

Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
Click the Distribution tab.
Click Modify on the Provisioning Profile that you want to reuse.
Switch to either Ad Hoc or App Store. The distinction between these two options is explained in the preceding section.
Click Submit.
You should see a list of the Provisioning Profiles that you’ve created. Click download on the Provisioning Profile that you just modified, and save it to your computer.

Download your Distribution Certificate

You just need to download the Distribution Signing Certificate that you created at the top of this tutorial, and then you are ready to bundle your .ipa file to submit to the App Store.

Click on the Certificates section in the sidebar.
Click the Distribution tab.
You’ll see that your Distribution Signing Certificate is ready to download. You can also see that it contains the Distribution Provisioning Profile that you just made.

Click download and save the file to your computer. Just to make things easier, you can save that certificate in the Open SSL bin folder, where your Certificate Signing Request file is sitting.

Note: Make sure not to get confused between your Development Certificate and Profile, and your Distribution Certificate and Profile. You won’t be able to upload your app to the App Store if you accidentally use the Distribution set of certs in these next steps.

Convert the Signing Certificate to a .p12 File

You’ll have to perform the .p12 conversion on your Certificate again, as you did in an earlier tutorial. Here are the steps:

Open up your command prompt.
Navigate to your Open SSL bin folder.
Copy and paste this command:
```
openssl x509 -in distribution_identity.cer -inform DER -out distribution_identity.pem -outform PEM
```
After you enter that command, you’ll see a .pem file show up in your OpenSSL bin folder.
Copy and paste this command in the CLI:
```
openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey mykey.key -in distribution_identity.pem -out iphone_dev.p12
```
Note: These are the exact same commands that you used for our Development Certificate in an earlier tutorial, except that the file name has been changed from “development” to “distribution”.
After you punch in the command, enter a password and then verify that password. Make sure the password is something that you will remember. (Save it in a .txt file! – Ed.)
Note: Remember that you may get an error mentioning a “random state”. Just type in the command set RANDFILE=.rnd and it should fix the problem for you.
Navigate to the bin folder in your Open SSL directory and you should see your .p12 file. Hooray!

Hello, Planet

As we mentioned off the top, much of this is familiar territory. With all of your Distribution certs sorted out, you’re ready to bundle up your final .ipa file and foist it onto an unsuspecting public. In the next tutorial, you’ll follow familiar instructions to bind your certs to your .ipa, and experience that magical moment of uploading your app for Apple’s approval (followed shortly by that equally magical moment of getting your app rejected cuz BEWBZ.) Let’s do it!

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 1)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:33:33 +0000

This is the first part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

Dead Wrong

There’s a lot of FUD floating around about Flash these days. Ever since Steve Jobs took to the mic and sounded the death knell of at least the perception of Flash, there’s been heaping gobs of misinformation about what you can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do with Flash. i chalk it up to the fact that death is news. It’s BIG news when Michael Jackson dies, BIG news when Steve Jobs dies, and equally big news if you can be among the first to report on the death of a technology or company – RIM, Flash, Palm, HP – take your pick. If it bleeds, it leads.

Saying stuff is dead, is dead. You heard it here first.

This hyperbolic and sensational misreporting is particularly damaging for those of us who have made our living developing with Flash and Actionscript. Back in 2000, when i first got into Flash, i chose it because the alternative was HTML. HTML appeared and performed completely differently depending on a number of different factors:

The platform (Mac, PC or Linux)
The screen resolution (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, etc)
The browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari)
The browser version (HTML could render completely differently from IE6 to IE7)

Meanwhile with Flash, i could build something inside the little Flash Player box, and it would look and behave reasonably identically across platforms, resolutions, browsers, and browser versions. (Subsequent versions of the Flash player complicated things a smidge, but we were still WORLDS away from the pain of HTML). What’s more, as a visual person, i could actually lay things out within the tool, instead of coding them abstractly and waiting to see how the browser would render them. If i wanted something to appear over there, i picked it up and put it over there. No futzing around with padding or align tags for hours.

The push towards HTML5 doesn’t scare me – more accurately, it makes me feel ill. It’s a step backwards. Without proper tooling, i see myself banging my head against the wall picturing absolutely everything in codespace (rather than concretely laid out in front of me in designspace), and programming all kinds of exception cases so that my content performs properly depending on platform, browser and version. You know what? No thanks.

Thank God Flash is dead! Now we can finally move forward.

Prying Flash from my Cold, Dead Hands

As long as the tools for other technologies stink, and as long as i can keep making and monetizing projects in Flash, i’m going to stay the course until there’s a compelling technological /creative/workflow reason to make a jump. Untold Entertainment has deployed two games written in Actionscript (Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and Heads) across two different mobile platforms (Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook), and we’re just getting warmed up.

Here are the facts, at the time of this writing:

No one really wants to play a game in a browser on a phone. Native apps are where it’s at.
Yes, you CAN put Flash- and Actionscript-created content on an iPhone, in native app format.
You can even do it without having to buy Flash Professional or Creative Suite.
You can develop entirely on a PC until the very last step (uploading content to the App Store).
Untold Entertainment is about to show you how.

What You’ll Need

While buying Adobe’s tools is optional, you’ll still need to spend a bit of money (or mug the right people) to pull this off. Here’s what you’ll need:

An Apple Developer account, which is $99 USD/year. Once you start down this path, you’re in it for the long haul … if you let your developer account lapse, they pull all your products off the store. For realsies.
A Mac (not free) running the latest version of Xcode (free).
An iOS device (optional, but obviously recommended).
FlashDevelop v4 or better (free, PC-only)

A Mac: not free.

Introducing Sina

He’s the spitting image of this guy – i swear.

Sina Kashanizadeh is a Sheridan College computer programming student and an intern here at Untold Entertainment. He’s done all the legwork in this process, and has written this step-by-step guiding on porting your Actionscript projects to iOS. Take it away, Sina!

Flash on iOS? So You Want to Be a Hero…

With the mobile world expanding at a crazy rate you may have had the crazy idea to try making an App yourself and putting it on the iPhone. Well, you’re a brave soul, because it can be a confusing task. This is why I have scoured the internet and composed a step by step tutorial of this process. This tutorial would not have been possible without the fantastic people that maintain FlashDevelop and the wonderful community behind it. I would also like to thank Lee Brimelow and Adobe for putting out some great tutorial videos that helped me out a lot. Last but not least, I would like to thank CodeandVisual.com for putting up a fantastic comprehensive guide that inspired me to move forward whenever I had trouble writing this tutorial.

I just want to be clear that this tutorial is not the “be-all, end-all” of this process. There are many different ways of transferring your Flash App to iOS, and the problems I cover are specific to my method. Also, the process I cover is PC-specific.

Getting Started

Before we begin, I would like to recommend a very good video resource by Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow, in which he explains the basics of adding an app to the App Store when using Flash. If you do not know how this process works, I highly recommend this video, as it breaks down the somewhat painful process of adding an AIR App to the App Store when using a PC (thanks again, Lee!). The good news is that if you go through this once, you’ll understand the ins and outs of the process. You only have to do the most painful parts once.

The video covers a myriad of stuff but the basics boil down to this: Your end goal is to create an .ipa file, which is what you’ll upload to the App Store. To do this you will require:

An App
An iOS developer ID from Apple ($)
An iPad or iPhone ($)
A Mac ($, but required for one step only … borrow one from a friend!)
A Signing Certificate
A Mobile Provisioning Profile
YOUR SOUL

Sounds like fun? Well it isn’t, but let’s get cracking anyway!

Any Club that would Have Me as a Member

As I mentioned above, you’ll need a developer ID from Apple. Head over to the iOS Dev Center and register for “free”.

“Free” as in “Free Beer … that you have to pay for.”

Go through the steps of signing up and the email verification and you will acquire an Apple ID. Now, the unfortunate thing is that you get the Apple ID for free, but if you want to develop anything with it on a device – even a silly test app that you will never release – you will have to pay $99 a year. You’d better be positive that your Angry Birds clone will be worth at least a hundred bucks a year in revenue. You can sign up for a free student account, but again you can’t really do anything with it unless you drop some cash. If you are helping someone develop an App for the iPhone/iPad and they are paying the developer fee, they can add you as a partner to their project.

Adding a Device to Your Developer Account

If you want to test and ultimately launch this App, you will need an Apple device such as an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. You will also need to register your Apple device with your Apple ID. Follow these steps:

Go into the iOS Developer website and log in with your new account info. Here, you will see the iOS Provisioning Portal. Click on it to see further options.
click Devices in the sidebar.
Click Add Devices.Note: if you are a partner developer with a team member profile, you will not be able to add a device. The option will only appear for the master account holder.
On this screen, you can add up to 100 devices to your account. Start off by adding your Device Name. Nothing fancy here – just enter something that will help you identify it – ie “Sina’s iPad”, or “iPhone what i stole from that guy that one time”.
Enter the Device ID (40 hex characters). This is the serial number that is associated with the device that you are trying to register. To find this Device ID, open iTunes while your device is connected. On the main screen, you will see all the information about your device, including a field called Serial Number. It doesn’t look clickable, but click on that field anyway and the number changes to a hex code. That’s your device ID.
Once you’ve filled in those details, click Submit and the device will be added to your Developer account. Now you can build an Adobe AIR application and test it on your device.The next tutorial will take you through the process of requesting and creating a Signing Certificate, converting that certificate to the p12 format that Apple requires, and generating a Mobile Provisioning Profile for your new app.
Continue to Part 2

Made in Canada AND with Unity: Apollo 11: The Game

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:09:49 +0000

Today, we’re combining our Made in Canada and Made with Unity features into one: Made Through Canudity (working title). Decode Entertainment is a Canadian convergent media company that creates kids’ teevee shows and interactive properties. If you own any toddlers like i do (i’m collecting), you’ll recognize a few of their shows: Bo on the GO!, Animal Mechanicals, Franny’s Feet and Super Why!. i’m sure that someone from Decode will pop on here later and correct me, explaining that one of those shows was actually a Canada/France co-production with funding from a Swiss snowmobile manufacturer, and it technically flies under the banner of the parent company DHX Media Ltd., but you know what? Stow it. These nice people have better things to do than to wade through the labyrinth of Canadian content credits.

NASA As They Wanna Be

Decode Interactive, the “digital” arm of the company (don’t get me started) collaborated with NASA to produce Apollo 11: The Game for the iPhone. i have it on good authority that the Decode Interactive team visited the actual sound stage where NASA faked the original moon landing. Think of the game as an advanced Lunar Lander, the one where you have to gently land your rocketship without blowing it up. Except here, you have more true-to-life NASA-esque controls, and “blowing up” is more analgous to “wasting millions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money.”

Even if you missed Apollos 1 through 10, it’s not hard to pick up the plot.

The team obviously strove for authenticity to hit a niche audience of NASA-enthusiasts – otherwise, the surface of the moon would have been a little more colourful, and the lander would have been able to fire spiky blue turtle shells to knock out competing lunar landers from other countries. You can’t please everybody, so in trying to please space nuts, the game may alienate players looking for something more candy-coated and fun. But if you are a HAM radio operator, and you used to play with an erector set, and you own Red Dwarf on DVD, this game might be just your speed.

And Now, de Codes from Decode

The title was authored in Unity 3D with the Unity for iPhone add-on. Unity is the little-game-engine-that-could that recently took the piss out of Unreal Engine’s consumer-grade product launch by offering their engine for $FREE. The Decode Interactive team has a number of other Unity-based projects in the works, and they sponsored the first Toronto Unity Users Group meeting earlier this week. If you come out to one of our upcoming UUG Toronto events, be sure to shake hands with these guys – they’re a great resource, and they’re keen to help developers wrap their brains around the Unity 3D technology.

Jean-Guy Niquet, a regular contributor to our conversations here and an erector set fan in his own right (oo-er!), heads up the merry band of Decode Interactive programmers. He’s been kind enough to offer us a batch of FREE CODES for the game – first come, first served. As usual, here’s the drill: the codes are good for YANKEES ONLY. If you DON’T live in God’s America, they’re not going to work for you. (Thanks, Apple!) And if you successfully redeem one of these codes, please let us know – we’ll strike it from the list.

Here are the codes for a FREE copy of Apollo 11: The Game:

RYMAEX3X7N9M – Redeemed by segra!
4RLEWLX67XEP – Redeemed by Brennon!
9PPN3FTE6W4T
9YJL4R4766NE – Redeemed by Abdullah!
XRKJXH4TYPKL – Redeemed by Gabriel!

And if you do give the game a shot, please let us know how you liked it!

Eagle out.

Made in Canada: Arctic Shuffle 2

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:27:01 +0000

Zinc Roe is a Toronto-based interactive studio that’s well-known here in Canada, but maybe not to the rest of the world. Their claim to fame, The Zimmer Twins, was a television show that kids could edit together online, with a number of pre-fab animations and settings. The Zinc Roe team then took some submissions, voiced and scored them, and aired them on the teevee. Neat!

So what have they done lately? The company is pretty busy releasing games in the App Store. i took an “iPhone for Flash Developers” course last year with zr programmer Luke Lutman, but Luke’s such a clever fellow they were already well on their way by that point. Among their earliest entries is Arctic Shuffle 2, which combines the very Canadian sport of curling with the very un-Canadian animal of penguin (it’s cold here, but penguins live near the opposite pole – the ANTarctic), with a healthy dose of mini-golf thrown in just to mix things up a little.

Je ne suis pas Canadien, d’accord?

i confess that i didn’t play Arctic Shuffle 1, so there may be some major plot revelations that i’m missing out on. But in the sequel, you tap a golf-style mechanic at the bottom of the screen to launch your penguins toward a curling/crokinole-type target ring. If a penguin comes to a rest safely inside the ring, you’re onto the next level. Unfortunately, penguins more often than not ricochet off of glaciers and into gaping ice holes. In later levels, you have to creatively bounce penguins off each other to get them into the ring safely.

The game’s production values are very good. The team has taken a page out of the Game Escalation Playbook, where instead of ramping the challenge up in a straight line, there are peaks and valleys where you’ll finish a very difficult level, and then breeze by the disconcertingly simple next level. This is a technique that encourages people to keep playing, and it works very well for a game like this.

Arctic Shuffle 2 features many natural antarctic obstacles, including deadly spikes and anthropomorphosized explosives.

Sure, But Is It Free?

Studio head Jason Krogh was good enough to offer three codes for the game. The codes are only valid with a US iTunes account, and they’re not reusable. If you get a FREE copy of Artic Shuffle 2, please let the rest of us know which code you redeemed so that we don’t waste our time punching it in. And if you feel so compelled, please throw a mini-review over in our What Are You Playing? forum.

Here are those codes:

6YXTXJL93XL3
FMMH7ETF6P77 – redeemed!
AAWW9LHENTR4 – redeemed!

Enjoy!

Made with Unity3D: Paradudes and Bomb Factory

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:59:48 +0000

i ran into Zylex of M2H Game Studio in the #Unity3D chat channel on IRC. He had just launched two products in the iPhone App Store and was trying to promote them. Since both products were made with Unity iPhone AND one was free AND he was gracious enough to provide a promo code for the other to one lucky reader, i thought it would be a nice idea to give him some love.

So we totally did it, and then i stmbled onto the corporate blog with sex hair to promote his games.

Paradudes

Flying nerds.

This simple tap-em-up features bespectacled, be-parachuted dudes who fall from the sky at an increasingly rapid pace. You touch the ‘dudes to make them pop their chutes and slow down. Each chuted dude gives you a coin, and sheds an additional bonus coin that you can tap for double the points. If a ‘dude drops off the screen with no chute, you lose a heart. Lose all of your hearts, and the universe implodes, both destroying you and causing time and space to fold in on themselves.

Don’t let the title confuse you: there are more than two of them.

Speed isn’t the only escalation: the game introduces ‘dudes who already have their chutes open, so that when you instinctively tap them, they close their chutes and plummet to their (presumably) adorable deaths. There is also POISONED MONEY (American, i guess?) that makes you lose hearts when tapped. Add to this balloons that need to be popped, and falcons that need to be … murdered? i’m not sure. But they’re worth bonus points. The high scores screen also lists UFOs, of which i saw NONE because games like these usually put me into cardiac arrest within the first thirty seconds.

If you see a falcon, assassinate it, for it is worth points.

Paradudes is an excellent testimony to the fact that just because you wield fancy 3D game software like Unity for iPhone, it doesn’t mean you have to produce something complex or technologically mind-blowing. Paradudes is essentially a 2D game with 3D models with all the hooks to make it a fun little tap-fest. And you can’t beat free.

Download Paradudes from the iTunes App Store!

Bomb Factory

Bomb Factory: incidentally shares its name with the film studio that casts American Idol winners in lead roles.

i can’t give a succinct review of Bomb Factory because i didn’t play it – i didn’t want to shell out the 99 cents because Zylex is a lousy kisser. But maybe you can try it out and leave a review on our What Are You Playing? forum? Zylex was good enough to provide us with a promo code for a FREE version of the game. The code can only be redeemed through a US iTunes account, so if you’re from a decent and peaceable country, don’t bother trying it.

Bomb Factory promo code: MLRNL9LK4R7F

The code is single-use! If you’re the first reader to punch it in successfully, you’re the only reader to punch it in successfully. If you claim the code, please be decent and leave a comment to let us know so that the rest of us don’t waste our time typing it in. i won’t make you write a review – i promise.

Download Bomb Factory from the iTunes App Store!

Monkey See, Monkey Code

i LOVE seeing games that use a technology i’m learning, because it helps me write a longer “How’d They DO That?” list, and ultimately helps me to learn more of that technology. Until it got into the realm of hijacking Pixel Bender to do multi-threading, i was constantly trying to emulate amazing things i’d seen other people do in Flash. i hope that by showcasing games Made with Unity, your head will also start reeling with possibilities.

Unity 3D, iPhone, and a Small Favour

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:19:44 +0000

The tagline beside our corporate logo currently reads “We Make Flash Games”. This is a temporary tagline. i don’t think it’s wise to put all of your eggs in one basket, particularly when framing a game studio. And in light of Adobe/Macromedia’s handling of its product line (ie forcing a dramatic and difficult shift to Object Oriented Programming while rendering the timeline animation tools largely useless), i feel it’s wise to explore other options for creating games. We’re not finished with Flash quite yet, but we need to start scanning the horizon for new and better technologies.

Enter New and Better Technologies

Unity 3D

One of those technologies that you’ve likely heard of is Unity 3D. Unity (for short) is a game creation tool with a similar schtick as Flash – players accept a one-time download of a web player plugin, and from there they can download and display content created for the player. In this case, the content is THREE-DEE, baby. And i’m not talking about Flash 3D, which is like drinking non-alcoholic vodka, or even Papervision 3D and its ilk, which is like trying to turn a car into a plane by stapling cardboard wings to it. i’m talking all three dees, in glorious Technicolor, with … Blast Processing and 64 … i dunno … blytes of processing and render power. (Technical specs are not my strong suit. Could you tell?)

i love this post by Ethical Games, Confessions of a Flash Game Developer, which sums the situation up very nicely.

The Unity 3D Web Player, which i encourage you to download now in anticipation of all the awesome stuff we’ll be building, is currently 3.18MB. That’s only slightly larger than the Flash Player plugin at 1.87 MB. Penetration rate is the the real difference – i heard somewhere that Flash Player, with its various incarnations, is the most installed piece of software of all time. i think penetration is up somewhere around a thousand percent (all numbers approximated).

The Flash Player has a higher penetration rate than this guy.

But What Does It Cost?

From a developer standpoint, price is a big difference. Unity rocks out on multiple platforms including Wii and iPhone, but it also rocks out on different prices. The product appears deceptively inexpensive at first, but when you look at purchasing a real software solution and the accompanying programs it requires, you’ll find yourself wondering which credit union or train you’ll have to rob to afford it. Leave it to penny-pinching me to give you the breakdown:

Product #1 Unity 3D core engine. You must purchase this engine to be able to develop on any other non-PC/Mac platform. (ie you can’t just skip ahead and buy Unity iPhone on its own)

Unity Indie – $200
Unity Pro – $1500

Next up is the iPhone license. The Pro version is pretty crucial as it gives you stripping rights, which means that you can disable large chunks of the Unity3D framework that you don’t need, freeing up space and memory for your game. You also don’t have to display the Unity logo in front of your game.

Unity iPhone Basic – $400
Unity iPhone Advanced – $1500

Then there’s the Wii license. i see a lot of people mentioning it when they talk about Unity, but they obviously haven’t done their research – otherwise, it wouldn’t be a thought in their minds. You’ll notice from the Unity 3D pricing page that you have to contact the company to ask about Wii license pricing, and that it’s also listed with the source code for their entire app. It’s the same rule as restaurants: if they don’t list the price, you can’t afford it. When i spoke with a Unity 3D rep at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this year, he intimated that the then-current pricing was $10000.

Suffice it to say, Unity Wii is not part of our current strategy.

But That’s Not All

One of the biggest barriers to entry for us exploring the Unity 3D space is the 3D software we’d need. It’s all fine and dandy to have a great program like Unity with a smooth pipeline that integrates with a number of leading 3D software packages, but you need one of those 3D software packages, don’t you? The enormous cost of these packages has led us to explore various less expensive options – Cheetah3D, Blender, Sketch-Up … but in the end, none of them are as familiar or decent as the package i learned on in college, 3DStudio Max.

3ds Max: for all your miscellaneous chrome object needs.

Here’s the trouble:

Autodesk 3ds Max – $3495

Ouch. There used to be a lower-priced entry level program called gmax that the company discontinued, because they realized that they weren’t getting 3495 bloody dollars for it.

Putting It All Together

So let’s tally that all up. We have two developers, so we’d want two copies of Unity 3D core . But i figure we only need 1 pro license for deployment (i think?). We’d also only need 1 copy of Unity 3D iPhone, because we only have one Mac (and an Apple computer is required for iPhone deployment). Ideally, we’d buy two copies of 3ds Max, but unless and until the government approves gay marriage and i get hitched to Ritchie Rich, we’re looking at one copy.

Hey big spender … spend a little time with me.

So that’s:

1 Unity 3D Core Pro License – $1500
1 Unity 3D Indie License – $200
1 Unity 3D iPhone Pro License – $1500
1 Autodesk 3ds Max seat – 3495 friggin’ simoleans

Grand total: $6695

The Small Favour

i hope this has been an enjoyable learning experience, and a glimpse into the types of things that give a small business owner a grand mal seizure. The last time i spent over $7000 on something, it had a roof and indoor plumbing.

But you can help! The Unity 3D crew did a podcast interview wit the folks at Indie Game Dev Podcast Show. They gave the site a free Unity iPhone license to give away in a contest, which we entered. We very rarely enter contests, but in this case, all you had to do was write up a game idea. Preference will be given to the entrant who is the most likely to finish his project.

Well looky here … who’s got a perfectly AWESOME-LOOKING game in the works called Kahoots, which was modeled enirely in clay and built for the iPhone screen spec? (Answer: us.)

Kahoots™ FTW!

i get annoyed when people say “go here and vote for us!” What if their entry isn’t the best one? In this case, i’ll only say “Go here!” Click the link. Read the entries. And if you like what we have to offer the most, just leave a quick comment to tell the site owners you want to see us bring Kahoots™ to the iPhone.

According to the site, “Winner gets all the Unity tools needed to make an iPhone game using their platform.” i don’t know if this means they’re giving away the core engine along with the iPhone license, and whether they’re giving away pro or indie licenses (i suspect indie), but at the very least, it’ll knock $400 off the cost of our Unity 3D ambitions. And at the very most, it’ll cut the total down by $3000. Wowzers!

So search your heart! And if you find it in yourself to vote for us (we’re entry #8), i thank you very, very kindly. Voting ends today!

Update

We won … hooray! Thanks for voting.
A few quick questions to Tom Higgins from the Unity team cleared up some of my questions. Since a single company is not allowed to mix licenses (Pro and Indie), the cost of my software solution jumps up by a big $2400 to $9095. That’s almost ten-large for Unity3D iPhone for two people, and one copy of 3ds Max.
By biting the bullet and learning Blender instead of buying 3ds Max, the price comes down to $5600. That still be one spicy meat-a-ball.

One Step Forward, Nine Miles Back

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:23:15 +0000

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll know that we’ve been ramping up to iPhone development for the past – oh, six months or so. We bought an iMacBookUnibodyPowerProMini, or whatever the Hell it’s called. i dunno. It’s white. We picked up an iPod Touch. We took an “iPhone for Flash Developers” course. We bought into the Apple iPhone Developer Program, and were approved.

We’re still waiting for Apple to send our Secret Decoder Ring.

We’ve been building Kahoots™, our fun crime-themed puzzle game (which we’ve modeled entirely in clay) to the iPhone/iPod Touch screen spec, which is approximately 478 x effin’ tiny. i even went out and got one of those Apple tattoos, because that’s supposed to count for something. The one thing we haven’t done is to actually learn Objective-C and deploy something to the iPhone. Pfft. A minor detail.

With every step i take towards learning this new (to me) technology, it feels like a wall erupts out of the ground and up into my face:

An industry pal told me that the CoreAnimation libraries for the iPhone were very, very slow, and that even the simplest game slowed to a crawl. i would need to learn to program in openGL-ES.
Terrified by the prospect of having to learn the square bracket-crazy OBJ-C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was), i was seduced by the apparent C#/javascript-based simplicity of Unity3D, a game engine for creating browser-based and iPhone games
While evaluating Unity, every time i tried to access the software’s online documentation, their website was down
With Unity’s site proving unreliable, i resolved again to learn OBJ-C
At a recent iPhone developers meeting here in Toronto, devs told me that OBJ-C is mixed in with C++, so i should learn C++ while i’m at it
At the same meeting, other devs mentioned that the whole thing is hung on C. Now i was faced with the prospect of learning Objective-C, C++, C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was)

Fine. If that was my lot in life, then so be it. i’m not a stupid guy. i can learn things, like words and junk. And sometimes stuff. Sometimes i can learn stuff. And i wanted to program things for the iPhone, so if i had to learn four new languages in my off-hours, i was prepared to do that.

If “burning the Midnight Oil” refers to setting this guy on fire, i’m all for it.

Free Smarts from the Stanf’

Fellow devs mentioned repeatedly that i could audit a new publicly-available Stanford iPhone development course. The lectures are all recorded and posted for free on iTunes, and the assignments are all available online. Great! And the only pre-requisite was familiarity with Object-Oriented Programming, which i have under my belt since learning ActionScript 3 this past year. So off i went.

i watched the first two lectures, and then turned my attention to the assignments. Assignment #1a had me dragging things around the screen and breathing with my mouth open. No problem. i sailed right through it.

Assignment #1b asked me to write a few methods. Okay … no biggie. i know what a method is. i just didn’t know the OBJ-C format for writing a method. i know it starts with a minus sign, and you put the return type in there first, or some junk …

Assignment #1b asked me to open the documentation. So i did. Assignment #1b wanted me to look up the path-finding method for an NSString. i wanted to know how to write a method first. So i searched “method”. And then “method structure.” Nothing. Of course not – language references don’t exist to tell you how to build a car, or even to provide pictures of what a finished car looks like. They’re just encyclopedias of nuts and bolts you’ve never heard of.

I wouldn’t exactly say i “admire” people who can learn this way. “Fear them” is more like it.

To Google!

i started looking up OBJ-C code examples. Everything i found was needlessly complex. i just wanted the basic structure for a basic method with no arguments and no return types, and Google was all “but then you can flim-wang your fozzbuster!” And i was all “no thanks, Google! Just passing through.” And then i backed away slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements.

What was my last resort for help, short of asking my 60+-year-old mother for programming advice?

To IRC!

Internet Relay Chat is a magical place filled with verbally-abusive and generally terrible people who will sometimes help you with your problems if you appeal to their supposedly superior intellect and delusions of grandeur. i asked some folks in a related channel if they could refer me to a clean code example that would show me how to write a function. They copy/pasted exactly what i had written in XCode, which was throwing me errors.

One IRC person said that knowledge of OBJ-C was a pre-req for the Stanford course. i respectfully disagreed: the course syllabus only required a knowledge of Object Oriented Programming. Then he said something unkind about my 60+-year-old mother. i won’t repeat it.

Another person suggested that i go through Apple’s tutorial. So off i went to the Apple Developer Site, and found the Your First iPhone Application tutorial. Now i was getting somewhere!

“First” Apparently Has a Number of Meanings

The preamble to the tutorial mentioned that i should have both Objective-C knowledge AND Object-Oriented Programming knowledge before proceeding. It linked me to two different whitepapers. Somewhat afeared, i decided to take Apple’s advice and read up. One of the links was broken. Almost completely out of options by this point, i started in on the other link:Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C”.

i made it about 3/4 of the way down the page before looking around to see if i was on hidden camera or something. If this was it – if THIS was the most basic, square-one starting point that Apple recommended for someone in their iPhone Developer Program, then clearly i’d have to think about evolving into a new species so i could fly off of this planet and nuke the site from orbit.

Here’s a taste of what the whitepaper offered:

A programming language can be judged by the kinds of abstractions that it enables you to encode. You shouldn’t be distracted by extraneous matters or forced to express yourself using a vocabulary that doesn’t match the reality you’re trying to capture.

i read that sentence, and then i noticed a little feedback box at the bottom of the page. It asked “Hey. How ya doin? Are you digging the article so far? Hey? Has it met your needs, kiddo? If not, click here.”

i clicked so hard on that button that i dented my web browser.

What followed was somewhat of a tirade. The feedback went something like:

Are you serious? Did you guys proofread this before publishing it? It sounds like it was written by Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Oh, yes! (clap clap clap) Let us code for the iPhone forthwith, mummy! That would be resplendent!

i called the whitepaper heady and pretentious. And then, for good measure, i threw in something about Apple’s 60+-year-old-mother. That bit was fresh in my mind already.

But if this is the starting point, this is the starting point. Apparently, against my best wishes and hope for my own sanity, i somehow need to learn three new programming languages across two paradigms in reverse order of development AND openGL-ES (whatever THAT is) if i want to build games for the iPhone … which i do, because i’ve heard you can make like NINETY MILLION DOLLARS on a FART APP.

Or i can save myself some pain and suffering and eat a chimichanga. (** FRAAAPP! **) Ninety million dollars please?

Get Rich Slow

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:56:18 +0000

The crew at AppCubby has posted another excellent entry, titled The Experiment, where they agonize over the state of the iPhone App Store. The company dropped the price of their application to the supposedly mandated 99 cent mark, and compared total sales against revenue, concluding:

I was starting to think the $0.99 price point might actually be sustainable given the increase in volume … [but] it quickly became apparent that the $0.99 price point wasn’t going to work long term. The harsh reality is that very few apps can “make it up on volume”.

This piece is far less ranty than their other posts, which featured a lot of fist-shaking at God/Jobs and impotent fuming over why Apple wasn’t mailing them thousand dollar checks every day.

App Cubby watches its iPhone millionaire prospects fizzle.

Faced with banging out cheap and dirty fart soundboards and other unsavoury apps of limited utility, the developer courageously decides to charge what he feels his products are worth, and ignore the Klondike-style race to an overnight iPhone fortune.

i hope that this novel concept of earning money for hard work and earnest, quality development catches on. Meanwhile, for the month of March, please look forward to 99 cent sale price for Untold Entertainment’s JiggleTits 2.0.

Free iPhone App Store Redemption Code for Textropolis

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:12:32 +0000

Ian Marsh is an indie iPhone developer who sent me a redemption code to his latest game, Textropolis. He probably found me after my somewhat embarrassing nerdgasm over Wurdle, another iPhone word puzzle game that i discovered last week. i’m growing to appreciate the economy of design in many of these iPhone games: they’re lean, succinct, and – dare i say it? – pithy.

There. i said it. i said “Pithy.”

Textropolis. Word.

Compared to Wurdle, Textropolis is a much more zen-like game. It has no time limit, nothing exploding, and there’s no real pressure to muscle through it. Instead, you’re pleasantly trying to form as many words as possible from the letters that comprise various city names. The more points you score, the closer you get to unlocking star ratings for each city. Five stars are more stars than no stars, and that’s better, so you want more stars. Because … well, stars. You know how it goes. The “tropolis” part of the fiction has buildings springing up as you earn more stars, but i wasn’t paying close attention, because stars.

Probably the best feature to recommend Textropolis is the little plane that flies by with a banner announcing the definition of the word you just made. i’m a little tired of entering words like “AIT”, “TED”, and “STURMPUMFLUMPER” (95000 points!) in Wurdle without knowing what they actually mean. Textropolis makes you smart AND relaxes you AT THE SAME TIME. Also, there are stars. You can have five of them.

An obvious drawback to any major word game geek is that Textropolis uses a limited dictionary compared to the likes of Wurdle and others, which employ the official Scrabble/Boggle dictionary. i was a little annoyed that Textropolis refused to admit “TOWINGS” (as in, “i would park my car there, but for all the recent towings”), and “GITS” (as in, “i’d give you a ride home, but those gits towed my car again). The Textropolis dictionary is just limited enough to be frustrating.

Marsh vs. the Third Degree

Ian was kind enough to answer a few questions about iPhone development. And since his previous games have topped the charts, best take heed, y’hear? The redemption code for a free copy of Textropolis that Ian sent me isn’t valid for Canadian LOSERS like me, so if you watch closely, i’ll be burying it in the copy of this post so that ONE LUCKY READER can have a free copy of the game.

For the rest of you who try to redeem the code after it’s been used up, the game is only 99 cents. Suck it up and buy it already. i live in one of the richest countries in the world. i burn dollar bills to light all my new toys on fire. Give the man your 99 cents.

If you look in the mirror and see this kid, buy the damned game.

Untold Entertainment: Ian, thank you for joining us in our cool pirate lair shaped like a giant skull that looks totally awesome.

Ian Marsh: Glad to be here.

Untold Entertainment: Tell us about the origins of Textropolis.

Ian Marsh: Textropolis began its life as a small side project I worked on at a small failing Mobile Game Studio that was my first job out of college. It was J2ME, all of 63k and not too pretty. But it was all we would play in the office, and ever since I heard about the iPhone SDK I’ve been dreaming of making it for the iPhone.

Untold Entertainment: Did you hit any snags while developing the game?

Ian Marsh: Maybe the biggest challenge in the game was how to save the state of each level for 5 separate players. I ended up using a bit mask so each word in the city had a designated bit. This means that each city’s state can be saved by a string no longer than 20 characters or so.

Untold Entertainment: (smoking a rad-looking pipe) I see, I see. As an indie developer, how do you fund your projects?

Ian Marsh: Well the first game or two I put out were made in my spare time while still working at a full time job. Luckily those ended up selling well enough for me to quit my job and make games full time.

Untold Entertainment prez Ryan Henson Creighton and developer Ian Marsh (both obscured by foliage) stroll around Untold’s island interview getaway.

Untold Entertainment: Have your iPhone games done well enough to cover costs and to turn a profit?

Ian Marsh: Yes. (that’s good news! -ed.)

Untold Entertainment: Are you considering porting your games to other platforms, or are your iPhone controls too technology-specific to do that?

Ian Marsh: No, this would be a lot of work for a single developer. I’m just concentrating on the iPhone for now!

Untold Entertainment: What lessons have you learned from your first three games? Are you going to do anything differently for your fourth, or have you pretty much mastered the development process with your third game?

Ian Marsh: Start with solid gameplay and keep it simple. In my opinion the best type of mobile games are still simple pick up and play games even with the iPhone’s advanced hardware.

Untold Entertainment: What are you working on now?

Ian Marsh: Right now I’m promoting Textropolis. On the iPhone making the game is only half the battle unless you get terribly lucky. When you put out a game you have to try and keep it afloat long enough to get noticed, reviewed, and blogged about.

Untold Entertainment: Well, fat chance of that happening. Would you like to play Jell-O Twister?

Ian Marsh: Would i!

(debauchery ensues)

As promised, here’s the single-use redemption code for a FREE copy of Textropolis, courtesy of the developer (for amazing US citizens only! Code not for use by worthless, and often stupid Canadians):

TP73HFKLAJE9

Let me know if you were the lucky reader who successfully redeemed the code! If two or more people respond, i’ll know y’all know how to spell “LIAR”.

iMpressions

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:18:04 +0000

As i mentioned in another post (iPhone vs. the Basement Battalion), our decreasing faith in Flash development has lead us to investigate the iPhone. Our experiments in self-publishing our own Flash games (chronicled in our ongoing and depressing Pimp My Game series) have shown that there’s too much free content online to reasonably compete. The pricing models for Flash games are between $10-20 for a trial-based game, and zero dollars for most others. There’s a vast no-man’s-land in between. i’ve never seen a Flash game available online for between $0.99 and $9.99. It could exist – i’ve just never seen it.

So there’s a real need to fill in that pricing gap – the gap between “too much game” (i’m not likely to stick with Mystery Case Files long enough to get my ten dollars worth) and “not enough game” (the average length of time i’ll spend on a free online Flash game is two and a half seconds).

Ok, so i’m supposed to match three of the … LOOK! A DISTRACTINGLY SHINY OBJECT!

The (cr)App Store

The iPhone App Store fills in that gap admirably. While you still have a glut of free, mostly poor-quality games and apps, there’s a spectrum of higher-quality entertainment up for grabs between that $0.99-$9.99 range. More than ten dollars for an iPhone game is largely unheard of. But there’s a lot of debate currently raging among developers about what some are calling the “race to 99 cents”. They’re accusing most developers of devaluing their work, or gaming the system to get more attention for their app, forcing everyone else in turn to keep cutting the price of their apps until everything levels out at 99 cents, the lowest possible price to charge for content on the App Store.

Lengthy discussion follows many of these posts. And it was in reading these discussions that i formed my first impression of these strange beings, these “Mac people”, who i have been avoiding for so long.

i actually identify better with the witty fat guy than the arrogant, catty guy

Once Bitten, Mac Shy

i am a PC person. i’ve owned PCs for most of my life. i worked in a PC-only dev shop for over seven years. Every machine i’ve owned since i was 10 has been a PC. Because at 10 years old, i owned an Amiga.

The Amiga systems were better than the x86 PCs of the time. They were better for artists and musicians. They had better music and video capabilities. Images, animations and movies all played better on Amiga systems. Sounds like a certain fruit-branded platform we know today, doesn’t it?

The Amiga 500. It’s for artsy folks.

The problem with the Amiga platform is that everybody bought PCs, and the Amiga became more and more niche, until eventually all the hot software came out for IBM PCs and “clones”, and Amiga owners were left to seek each other out in weird underground support/software swap groups that met in the catacombs beneath ancient churches. i hear they had their own secret handshake and blood rites.

It was a lot like the BETAMax/VHS battle before it – you can argue til you’re fit to pop about which technology is best, and there may even be a clear winner … but the only thing that matters is what the majority of people buy. After i sunk $1000 into my Amiga 500 to buy a hard drive with a few MB of space on it, i saw the platform die a painful death soon after. Since then, i decided never to go with the “better” product, but always to side with the masses. Sometimes it hurts to be practical.

Yo Mama Uses a Mac

Sure, i make cracks about Macs just like the next non-Mac-owning guy. “i’m getting a Mac.” “Oh? i could’ve sworn you were straight”, and “Mac is so intuitive! To eject a disk – just drag the icon into the TRASH CAN”, etc etc. i bought into the stereotypes that 1. Macs were for creative (read:gay) people, and 2. that despite the company’s claims that the platform was super-easy to use, it wasn’t.

Well, it turns out i was actually right on both accounts. i started watching the developer videos for the iPhone SDK, and the parade of “creative” types reminded me of my stint in community theatre. Mac definitely, definitely attracts more gay dudes. As Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

My Mac is also nowhere near as easy to use as Apple would have us neophytes believe. You don’t have to spend much time with Xcode, Interface Builder, Keychain, and the iPhone Simulator before your screen is an absolute zoo of windows, modules and toolbars. Not only are the modules not integrated into a single system – within each module, there’s a laundry list of pallettes that float on your desktop and don’t reliably dock to anything, making it completely confusing to understand which program you’re actually working in. Of course, this is just my experience with Xcode, which is free – i haven’t tried any other Apple software, so i’m willing to reserve judgment.

If someone will tell me the Mac equivalent of the Windows-M “minimize all” command, i will marry your ugly cousin and paint your front porch

Impeccable Attention to Not Bursting into Flames

Where i’ve been really impressed with my Mac experience is in the hardware department. i have a MacBook – an older model, white Apple laptop – that cost me around $1200 CDN after i bullied FutureShop into matching BestBuy’s Boxing Week price. (Pro tip: they really back down on the warranty they try to sell you when you open up a web browser in their computer department and surf over to the pages and pages of Futureshop bashing on EhMac.ca).

My first laptop, my only laptop, is a beastly Dell XPS that i used $3k in corporate bursary money to purchase. It dents easily, and plaques and stickers are always falling off of it. It comes armed to the teeth with Dell bloatware, and it heats up to searing, kill-a-baby temperatures. It’s not a good machine at all, despite what CNet reviews would have you believe. (After buying some Dell monitors based on CNet reviews, i slowly came to the realization that Dell must sponsor reviews on the CNet site. i have since sworn off Dell altogether.)

My Dell XPS after seven minutes of operation. The “X” stands for “scorching bonfire”.

Dell must have done their marketing correctly, because people all over the place ask me how i like the XPS laptop – even when they can’t see the logo on the back of it, which mystifies me. It’s weird. It’s kind of like having this disease, and everyone oohs and aahs over it. “Oooh – the mumps! i’ve heard good things! How do you like them?”

Meanwhile, the MacBook is quiet and happy. The battery life is generous, and seems to outperform the XPS battery by a longshot. It coos at me when i start it up, and it’s gently stroking my thigh as i write this blog post. Something’s a little fishy about that last feature, but i’ll let it slide.

Drink the Apple-Flavoured Kool-Aid

One of Apple’s slogans is “Think Different”, and my early iPhone development experience has been just that – different. There’s definitely a different class of people posting on those message boards i posted above. They’re smarter. It’s obvious. These folks are a far cry from the teenagers hacking Flash and tossing out a mountain of free content from their moms’ basements – the Basement Battalion. The Flash community has its champions, but by and large, there’s a lot of desperate-seeming “me-tooism” and people doing their very best to learn Flash Actionscript so they can launch their sequel to Booby-Shooter 5000 on AddictingGames.com.

i dunno. Maybe i haven’t been around the Apple dev community long enough to have discovered the dregs. But i will say that through all of the Apple dev boards i’ve read, there seems to be this weird devotion to Apple. It unnerves me a little … “Apple” is spoken of with reverence, as if the devs are talking about a benevolent father figure instead of a corporation, who scolds them when they misbehave and who rewards them with technological goodies when they are nice. It’s a teensy bit Big Brother-ish, from an outsider’s perspective. A little cultish. i hope i don’t end up dead in a cot somewhere wearing new Reeboks with a mouthful of Kool-Aid in a bid to join Steve Jobs at the mothership.

Well … if the mothership is taking me to a planet where the market is crazy for independent games, and small shops are praised as a guiding light in interactive entertainment, i might just take a tiny sip.

Wurdle and the Brilliance of “Done”

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:54:32 +0000

i picked up the iPhone game Wurdle at the suggestion of TouchArcade, an excellent news site for iPhone game releases. On its surface, Wurdle is a simple game. Heck – beneath its surface, Wurdle is still a simple game – but it has a few tricks up its sleeve that elevate if from an amusing distraction, to a bloody-eyed, stay-up-all-night-and-forget-to-feed-the-cats-and-kids addiction.

Wurdle and its tabletop progenitor, Boggle

In essence, Wurdle is a Boggle clone with some tweakable settings that add enjoyment to an already solid experience. The player uses his finger (or a warm, terminating appendage of his choosing) to link the tiles in the grid, forming words of three or more letters. The timer counts down two minutes, and the points are tallied.

At the end of a round, the player can request a word list displaying all of the possible words that could be found in the puzzle grid. The words the player found – often 1/100th of the total list, at least in my case – are highlighted. The player can score bonus points for finding longer words, so the game keeps track of his high scores and lifetime longest words. Wurdle hooks into an online high scores database, which has disappointly been hacked six ways from Sunday.

Thirty THOUSAND? Scan this list carefully for other evidence of cheater-pantsing

Like Pulling Slots

But it’s the structure of the game that i find really brilliant. After a brief splash/load title screen, you are thrown right into the game. No instructions, no explanation – the timer’s ticking, and you’d better do something. Oh – looky here. Here are some letter blocks. What happens if i touch them … ?

Sure, you could argue that a game that “pays homage” to another, well-known game doesn’t need instructions. But i’m confident that any player who sees this game with fresh eyes, and sees that timer ticking down, will instinctively know what to to. And therein lies the game’s first stroke of brilliance – easy, pick-up-and-playablility.

The next brilliant bit comes in at the endgame screen. You’ve just pecked your way through the grid, finding words here and there, and the two-minute experience was over all too quickly. You pore over the complete word list and are aghast at the seemingly simple words that were RIGHT THERE, staring you in the face the whole time. Drat. Well – that was fun. Nothing to do now, i guess, but hit that little “Done” button in the corner …

OH TEH NOES! The grid’s been reshuffled, and the timer’s started again. It’s a new game! Buh … but i wasn’t consulted. Oh well – no time to think now. i’ve only got 1:54 left on the clock.

And you find more words. And the time runs out. And lo, it was fun. A satisfying experience. Now you are done, so you hit the “Done” button.

SWEET MERCY, it’s starting all over again!

And so on.

By the time you finish playing, you have a Rip Van Winkle beard tickling your toes and your children are all grown. The friends you loved have all passed away, and the radio is filled with the clamourous din of some noise they call “rock and roll.”

Didn’t want the world to change? Never should have played Wurdle, grandpappy!

How We Do Things ‘Round These Here Parts

In my neck of the woods, when you design the endgame screen, you leave space for a large button that says “Play Again.” i hate the “Play Again” button. It has two words on it. It’s bigger than all the other buttons – “Play”, “Quit”, “Help”, “More”, and the now-precious “Done”. It’s hard to reconcile the “Play Again” button with your tidy, tight little four-letter buttons. It’s big and clunky. It’s like that cousin you have who plunks his big rear end down on the couch at the family reunion when there clearly wasn’t enough room.

Worse than that, “Play Again” actually gives players a choice. Do meth addicts have a choice? Do bingo players have a choice? No. No they don’t. They’re addicted. And if you want a GAME to be addicted, you’re going to need stronger stuff than “Play Again.”

“Done” – what are these, these game magicks you wield? The player thinks he is finished, and then you start the game session again – all but forcing him to play again. It is a cruel trick, but a very effective one. You caught me this time, “Done.” But you will not catch me again. i will escape your wiles. i’ll just innocently click you, and …

OH FOR FECK’S SAKE! Two more minutes …

But Wait – There’s More!

It wasn’t until ten or twelve game sessions that i noticed the little “i” button in the corner of the interface, which lead me to a hidden treasure trove of customizable game goodies. Wurdle supports a play-and-pass mode, where up to four players can take turns forming words from the same shuffle. You can also adjust the timer limit, grid size, and minimum word length. And if you’re a Hasbro exec who finds it all too copyright-infringey, you can choose from an assortment of differently- coloured and textured tiles to mix it up a bit. It’s amazing how Wurdle feels like an entirely different game by swapping blue or green for orange.

Cosmetic changes can make all the difference

Fast pick-up-and-play action, a great degree of customizability, and a fiendishly mislabelled button conspire to make Wurdle an exemplar of amazing, economical game design, with that secret, elusive ingredient that i like to call “the Crack Factor”. If you’re designing a lower-priced, polished iPhone game that players will *perceive* as simple, take a cue from Wurdle.

Check out this tigsource forum for the creators’ perspective on their well-deserved rise to the top.

iPhone vs. the Basement Battalion

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:25:44 +0000

A few weeks ago, we took James Eberhardt’s Rich Media Institute class iPhone Application Development for Flash Developers, which we found very helpful. We’re trying to keep two balls in the air here at Untold Entertainment: the Client Services ball, and the Original Development ball. The customers interested in each ball are both very different beasts.

ProTip: Avoid doing a Google Image Search for “balls”

The folks attracted by our Client Services ball are generally patient, eager, and willing to pay fair market value for excellent work. On the flip side, they’re not always game-savvy (which is why they come to us), but they do have very specific ideas about what they’d like us to build. Many of the client games on our site arose from client concepts. So this customer provides us with financial freedom, but not a lot of creative freedom.

The Original Development ball is being juggled for the benefit of game-players. This crowd is impatient, impulsive, and (in the casual games space) not generally willing to pay for our work. This customer needs to be encouraged, coerced, enticed, or downright hoodwinked into purchasing our product. i’m not a big fan of coercion or hoodwinking, so we’ll have to stick to enticement and encouragement. This group is very game-savvy, and has a fairly good idea of what will and won’t make for a great game experience. We have complete creative freedom with this customer. But there’s a very big problem with the financials.

Bargain Basement

Increasingly, we find ourselves competing with free. Literal armies of hobbyists, most often the proverbial teens in their moms’ basements, grab a cracked copy of Flash and go to town, creating games and cartoons and submitting them to portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. They don’t get paid for their work, or are paid peanuts by “sponsors” who pony up between $25 and $2000. This kind of cash seems like a real steal to a 17-year-old, who can’t believe he’s getting paid for creating “Fart Boob Slayer 69: The Ass Fart Boobs Chronicles”. They don’t often do the simple math, dividing the money earned by the hours spent, to realize that a menial job at a carwash is more lucrative. Most of these creators don’t see a penny on their work, uploading stuff for free in the hopes of garnering high views and 5-star ratings from community members.

That’s all fine and good. But once your mom finally sells the house to vacation in Moosejaw and kicks you to the curb, you eventually realize that 5-star ratings from other 17-year-olds don’t put food on the table. Money does. And as long as you’re competing with free, ain’t no money.

Sure, they’re riding the rails and living in tent towns NOW. But once upon a time, they were ranked #14 on NewGrounds.

When Fun is Not Fun

The other problem is that the demands of the average casual Flash game player on sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds is impossibly high. There’s an unwritten rule about how much lasting enjoyment a free game needs to provide, and if it falls short of that benchmark, the game is ignored. What’s more, the bar is raised periodically by creators who sink an inordinate amount of time into their games, offering hundreds of levels, multiplayer modes, user-creation tools, and other goodies, all for free. Any game falling short of the perceived benchmark is “not a good game”.

If a game provides two minutes of enjoyment, rather than the golden five-minute benchmark, it is poorly received.

If it has a fun mechanic, but lacks levels, it’s no good.

If it has levels, but not enough of them, it languishes in obscurity.

If it has enough levels, but no high scores, it’s dismissed as pointless.

And so on.

It takes a lot of trial, error, and experimentation to find the right game balance to meet this invisible benchmark, which is slowly creeping up all the time. And if your game doesn’t make the grade, you’ve wasted your effort: even in the land of Free, casual games are a hit-driven business.

It’s for all these reasons that iPhone development, for us, appears as a shimmering oasis in a desert of unprofitability.

iSalvation?

We’re brand new to the platform. We’ve never developed a mobile title, or a Mac app. We’re not even a Mac shop – we run Windows PCs exclusively. The barrier to entry for us goes like this:

Buy a development Mac
Buy a device (iPhone or iPod Touch)
Sign up to be an Apple developer (free)
Apply for special developer status ($99 non-renewable, with a hefty wait time of two months or more)
Learn xcode, the development tool, and Objective-C, the programming language
Build games
Deploy games
Market games
Return to “Build games”, and repeat

This is a simplified flow, of course. Along the way are various snags, like the lack of community support (due to the newness of the platform), the approval process (there’s an outside chance that Apple will reject your game or app, after it’s completed and submitted), learning Objective-C (a difficult, weird language in my opinion), obtaining certificates to deploy to the iPod/iPhone (easily the most convoluted process i’ve seen in a lifetime of developing), and finally figuring out a way to stand out among the 10000 apps (and growing) that customers can buy.

Soon, finding our game in the App Store will be like finding a particular hippie at Woodstock

Bring it.

Despite these potential pitfalls, we’re up to the challenge. Software for the devices can be found and purchased in ONE PLACE, rather than all over Hell’s http half-acre. Apps can be self-published and self-priced, rather than adhering to a casual game publisher’s arbitrary $20 price point. And while some accuse Apple of devaluing games and apps just like they did with music at 99 cents a song (apparently the sweet spot for App Store offerings is also $.99 – read all about it in Trouble in the (99 cent) AppStore), we’d still be happy to make 70 cents on the dollar for a game with such a focussed demographic and great ditribution, as opposed to our as-yet failed adventures in online free game self publishing (see Pimp My Game).

The very best part in my mind is the barrier to entry. For a non-Mac shop terrified by the oddities in Objective-C, it’s a daunting prospect … but then i imagine how much more daunting it must be to the Basement Army of Flash teens, and i suddenly find myself sleeping a little easier, and walking with more of a spring in my step.