Hot chicks tcg has failed iOS submission

Last week while i was away in Canada doing some business stuff for my day job. I received an email from Apple stating that my submission of Hot Chicks the Card Game had failed to pass Review.

Here are some Details:

1. Took 8 days from my submission to receive the failed review email.
2. I logged into iTunesConnect.apple.com  and selected my game. Where it informed me 'The most recent version of your app has been rejected. Before resubmitting it, visit the Resolution Center for details on outstanding issues.'.
3. The big button top right took me to the resolution center.
4. The resolution center told me 'We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable,'... ouch!
5. 'Specifically, we noticed your app contains scantily clad women.' .. ok, not so bad after all eh!
6. So I was a bit confused at first till i read down further and 'A 17+ rating is required for apps which include content such as intense offensive language; frequent '.

Ok, it was now clear the 12+ rating i had sent the game into Apple with was not the correct one. Simply because of the word 'Frequent' for my scanilty clad women content.

It was very easy to reset the age rating, as it is a simple button click affair (i have no idea why i never clicked this radio button last time, bah!). So is that it? Just a simple age rating change?

Well no, of course not. Ya have to upload a NEW binary to submit an updated version to submit. This is a little annoying, but whatever. Now i have asked my friedn to re-upload the binary he used the first time. However I am worried it won't go up. I am also worried that even if it does they will want a Version number change.ie: go from v1.0 to v1.1 etc... time will tell. I am still waiting on contact from my Mac owning friend.

.. Oh one last thing. There is a contact page in the resolution center with all the details in it. It also has a box for you to reply it seems. So of course I had to try that out :)  Next day I got a nice reply to my inquiry. This is a cool way to ask for more details and such about the rejection, I FULLY applaud this kind of thing, as I was a bit more frustrated many moons ago with the anonymous way I got a rejection from WP7 dev (though that may have changed now)....

I'll write up more in this post I think when I know about those last few details.

Have fun out there,
Da Voodoochief

Den-O-Pain in Midway3, Playstation Home

Den-O-Pain is a secretive place reserved for only the most hardcore players. This is a special place and is available only to those that have earned the right to visit with Marla (She with the spanking board!).

I cannot honestly say what goes on inside this area and am a little nervous of visiting with her myself.

Check out this excellent screenshot I just took.

I hope to see everyone enjoying Marlas exciting company when Midway 3 launches. Currently it is still in test at Sony QA (such a lot to test).

Have a great week, talk to ya all when i get back (yeah, i am not heer atm.. Canada.. Cold.. brrr)

Da Voodoochief

Away in Canada

So I am now IN Canada suffering major JetLag (4 hours lost). This means I will most likely not be able to update this Blog, though I have a couple of Posts cached already for publication while i am away for some training (like this one). I am going to a place called Moncton in New Brunswick. Gonna be cold laddies! brrrr, Later tonight i'll be getting all me cold weather clothing out and packed. Cos it ain't no SoCal haha.

I also want to mention a HUGE milestone for me and Hot Chicks the Card Game (not WP7 version). The Scoreloop.com leaderboard I have implemented has just reached 500 entries today, that is about 2 days after it went live on the Android device. So I am very happy indeed with this. When the iOS version goes out it will already have Scoreloop leaderboards built in, so I am hoping for several more thousand entries after a couple of weeks. Woohoo! gotta love it. I see approximately 33 new and changing entries per 24 hour period, so that is also exciting to see.

Have a great day,
Da Voodoochief

Arcade Game in PSHome

I have been working on coding up a new Arcade Game experience for Playstation Home, for Mass Media Games (my day job). This arcade game will be very visually appealing and also wil allow spectators to watch you play. So if you are a Kick Ass arcade style game player, then you can show off ya moves like I used to do way back when.

It is still a work in progress and the default untextered arcade cabinet will of course alter. It needs a nice makeover and a rad skin added. It does who what I am lokoing at each day though :)

I know this is a bit of a mean teaser, but I think it is better than nothing. The game si pretty fun to play and more importantly compete. I currently hold the company high score (as i should really!), but i have some stiff competition here at Mass Media Games. Obviously this was a quick game by someone else and I took the screenshot just after they died and it was game over. Time to commiserate them on a crap score eh! haha

Laters

Da Voodoochief

Program or Sleep?

I know so many Indie deveoplers face this choice nearly every day. The desire to get stuff done and the time it takes sparring with the time you need to sleep and recharge the batteries.

Lately I have been working late as I seem to be getting really productive just at the tme I need to go to sleep. The rest of the house is quiet and all I can hear is myself think. A great time to just pound out some code, or tweak gamplay or design. The thing is, all this sleep deprevation will eventually catch up with us, and has to be dealt with. I am also concerned about the fact that before we crash, usually we have a period of thick headedness, and that is just not productive time. So instead of getting into this situation, maybe we should go to bed, and then when we wake do some work. If we don't wake up early enough to put some time into our own projects before going to our day jobs, then so be it. Wouldn't our body at least have a chance to regulate better then?

Myself i have chosen a slightly different path. I have learned to nap in my trucks back seat and sometimes I will make up 30-40 minutes of sleep after I have eaten my lunch. It all neatly fits into an hour and yet I made up some sleep i so sorely needed.

It is hard to not produce or code though when I am in the mood. So i am not sure I am a good person to give out any advice on this subject haha

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Upload My App to iTunes Issue

After getting my game setup in iTunesconnect.apple.com I thought the upload process would be fairly easy. Though of course I already knew I needed a Mac for That! (as opposed to an App for That. Luckily one of my friends was brow beaten into helping me yesterday lunch time (thanks Paul). After a few false starts where his Mac only wanted to use some old install of the uploader. Oh, and also the fact we had trouble findig the new uploader to get off the web, gah! 


Anyway we finally got it to run with MY credentials and not his (he also has a membership and has several items on the iTunes store.). Once runnig we slected the file we wanted and all seemd to go well, till we get a report saying we had failed. AWWW! NOOOO MON!

Here is a picture of the report:

As you can they are indeed real and intriguing looking errors. As I had no history or experience I have no idea how bad these errors are.

So the first error seemed really simply to me, and I knew where in the deploy tools supplied by www.madewithmarmalade.com that would be. So it was simply me being overly copy and pastey (is that gonna be a saying now, haha!). The other error I spent some time going over, but everything looks good. So  I decided to be very sensible. Only fix one error and see what that generated when uploaded.

So I sent off my newly created Zip file to my firend via email and this morning when I got up I had received an email saying he had had some trouble. That was it... Then I noticed the next email in my inbox. It was from iTunes istself thanking me for the upload and now the game was in 'waiting for review' stage.

Check this image, it is what every Apple dev wants to see when they have finished their App.

Ok, ok. I know what ya thinkinjg, this isn't what ya wanna see. This is just a stage along the path to world wide release. You would be right, but every journey has several steps before the destination is reached. This is a huge step for me. After all I built this package file on my PC and not in X-Code on the Mac as so many before me have.

I am very VERY excited to see this move onto the next stage. And as i have recently witnessed with one of my Peers (@TimTheCoder on titter) going through this review stage for his RC-AirSim game. It went smoothly for him, if not a little slow.

I shall endeavour to be patient and just wait to see what happens, even thoug i am Sooo excited!

Laters all,
Da Voodoochief

iOS Game Creation

I thought it would be obvious, and maybe to some people it WAS obvious (though i am not cetain of that). One would expect it to be blinking obvious too, especially with so many having gone before me.

I am talking about creating a game Name and Metadata setup for iOS devices (an instance if ya like of a game for me to fill in the details and upload a binary). Well it wasn't obvious. I created my Signed game bnary and then simply figured I would create the instance of the game within the developer.apple.com. Only I could not for the life of me find the link to create a game.I thought maybe there was some special name to the process. In the end I gave up for the night, instead satisfying myself with the fact I had built a Distribution binary. (yes, that is the signed version that you upload to Apple).

So next day comes around and I send off an email to a couple of friends who have gone through this process before (always try ya friends when in annoying situations). Well before they even got back to me I have looked around the Developer site some more to no avail. Then I decided to sign into a different part of the Apple system. itunesconnect.apple.com and looking around there I saw a link titled 'Manage your Aplpications'... oh wow.. this could be it!

Clicking that link took me to a nice page with a big button stating 'Add NewApp'. I was in the right place. Woohoo! I proceeded to go through the directed steps, filling in the fields I knew about. Then as I did not have ALL the relevant information I clicked 'Save'. Well it moaned in red text that i was required to fill out more fields. Though I had not got the relevant information on me at the time. So i left it expecting the process would have saved the current point I was at in the setup process.

Then I went home,

Once home I quickly booted my PC and went back to the itunesconnect site. Only to find that my partial setup had not been saved. I was a bit bummed about this, but it is not something I could change or alter. So I dived into the process and redid all the fields, yet now I could do so much more. I filled in all the MetaData and language choices and stuff. It is all very easy and yet I was also surprised by a coulpe of fields, present and missing.
Missing:
  Features List (I like this list that some sites use)
Surprising:

1.  Keywords space is limited to ONLY 100 bytes. This was disappointing as I took a long time coming up with my games keywords and yet mine are 200 bytes long (and used for Android and WP7)
2.  Image sizes. I really think that these systems need to all get on the same page. WTH am I having to create a 57x57 icon, and then a 50x50 icon. These sizes MAKE NO SENSE.
3. Rounding of Icon image. The main Icon (512x512) has it's corners rounded automatically after upload. No mention of this, bah!
4. The upload of the Screenshot images is uninformative and annoying. I select an image off my hard drive and then wait till it shows up on the web page. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it did not. Refreshing the page would sometimes show it up, and sometimes not. So I only uploaded3 for the ipod/iphone sizes in the end (sizes of 960x640)
5. I HAD to upload at least one screenshot for the iPad section (1024x600). This is a resized version from the 800x480 I had from WP7 dev. Seems odd they couldn't just use an iPod one though.

All of this was of course just par for the course, but now I have my game setup and waiting a binary upload. Which means i NEED a Mac for this step. Only I don't own one. So tomorrow I am hopefully going to be able to use a friends Macbook and upload my binary, which will also put it into the Apple review process. (wish me luck!)

Hope your Apple Game/App setup goes smoothly,
Da Voodoochief