The final game has 100 hand drawn rooms. That took some doing.


Another interesting thing is that upgrading to 3.0 solved our slow blitting issues, obviously it was a firmware bug. Weird way to end that challenge, and interesting to think that the *days* I put in to trying to solve it were pointless.

The lesson is, if you have speed issues with lots of blitting from the display upgrade to 3.0 - it’s fixed!

Just finished recording a voice track for the whole game, that’s right, it’s not just text anymore. Everyone talks.

Been working away at that for a couple of weeks but didn’t want to announce it until we know it worked out

The game is now complete but we still have some frustrating performance issues. Even though the game is a static screen based adventure we are using a lot of effects on screen (especially with water) and this is something the iPhone just does not seem to like us doing.

We were recently contacted by Edgelib who had read of our troubles and move to RabbitFactory. They have offered to help us get the best from Edgelib & openGL and it’s what we are currently trying to do.

Edgelib does allow blitting to and from the display buffer which makes things a lot easier - if we are to do any sequel games it’s essential the engine is as perfect as it can be to avoid major issues later on.

This is all, as you might imagine, frustrating.

Here is an example of an improvement we have gained by giving ourselves extra time, these are the same room, one from last month, and the same one from this month, quite a change!

We have had some long conversations in the last few days and taken notice of what our testers are saying.

We are going to make this a full sized commercial game.

The delay with approval allowed us to add a lot more in to the game and it’s clear that we are now looking at much more than a 30 day game, this has turned out much better than expected and with the interest from the press it would be foolish to waste this opportunity. So we are now aiming for a release at the end of this month.

The game will be much bigger, much more graphics, more sound, overall a real commercial game.

So thanks for that delay apple

I’m getting nowhere with approval (and I have to admit is getting frustrating now) so I’m going to re-apply as an individual account to see if that speeds things up. Thanks for the advice via posts.

We are still tweaking and bug fixing in this time so nothing is lost, actually Ruckage is doing some superb new art work and improving the look of the game on a daily basis, the time delay is only making this game better and better.

We really have a superb looking high quality unique iPhone game on our hands now, the feedback is amazing, looks like this is going to be reviewed by some major websites too!

Thanks for all the advice on getting my iPhone developer approval, well the time is almost up now so we are going to have to make some moves on apple.

On Tuesday I’m going to call them and see if we can push this approval forward as I think we have waited long enough now (4 weeks!).

During that time we have some nice new touches to get in the game and some reported bugs to fix, it’s looking very good and I should have a build to film tomorrow.