The gang at Playhaven just gave us the go-ahead to point our "Tips" button to the Snowferno game pages on playhaven.com.

Ben wrote previously about why we chose Playhaven to power our Support/Community features. He also wrote over on the escapeFactory blog how to open a UIWebView in Unity3D, which was essential to integrating Playhaven's model with Snowferno.

We're really excited about this partnership and the community features that Playhaven enables.

Here are some screenshots of what you'll find when you tap "Tips" from the Snowferno main menu... Enjoy!

(P.S: sorry I don't have a Lightbox plugin on the site yet -- it's added to my to-do list...)

It's easy to get spoiled with good reviews, and even easier to quote just those. But what about bad reviews?

Well, you're going to find them, so we'd be stupid to pretend they don't exist. And one of our first was Ben Briggs' Snowferno review today on we play iPhone.

Right off the bat, it's pretty impossible to recover when the reviewer expected from our app title a different game than what we wrote, but his review still had some good points. We don't think that what essentially boils down to "not terribly compelling" merits a D rating, but maybe a year ago -- when there weren't 100,000 other apps to choose from -- we might have scored better with our freshman effort.

Our goal with Snowferno was always, in fact, to tackle the App Store with a simple concept and learn a ton getting it built. We're extra pleased that most people love playing it. And if not? Well, we're just getting going and maybe you'll like our next one better. :)

Unity3D is progressing, as is our knowledge of optimizing within that game engine... we'll see if we can't also smooth out some more of those terrain bugs. But thanks to Ben Briggs for giving us his time for a review!

And last -- about the demerit for "no save state"... he must mean returning mid-level i.e. if interrupted by a call. But it makes it sound like we make you replay Snowferno from the beginning each time, which isn't true. There is a world map, and any level you solve is unlocked for good. Even if you have to reinstall Snowferno, our leaderboard remembers and unlocks your game the next time you boot up.

Not to split hairs, but I just wanted to point that out.

3 new (ahem, glowing) reviews from the iTunes App Store:

Very Fun & Challenging - 5 stars, by Greg Meach
"Starts out very easy but then fairly quickly it will challenge you. The online scoring keeps you coming back to try and improve your time(s). Once you solve the level that is. Check out the web site to see a demo. Highly recommend over many of the other "marble rolling" type games. The simple fact that you can get smaller (with fire) and larger (with snow) and a unique challenge."

Awesome Game - 5 stars, by I Firebird I
"This game is so much fun! Challenging entertainment for everyone. Graphics make you feel like you're there. The controls are great and quick to learn. Makes great use of the accelerometer. The adjustable camera angles is a real plus which most developers forget about. And with the leaderboard this game has it all - a must get."

Great game!!! - 4 stars, by ravenmk
"Fun and pretty ... Love live highscores :D"

The v1.1 update to Snowferno is now Ready For Sale!! Of course, if you already have it, just check your iTuneses or App Store "Updates" button for your free fresh copy.

In this update you will find:

• Better performance for all devices
• Built with new Unity iPhone 1.5
• New Global Leaderboard integration in-game with webview
• New tips from the Community powered by (the already-launched-but-soon-to-be-styled-for-in-game-coolness) playhaven.com
• Fixed a few terrain bugs where you could get stuck

Happy rolling!

We just submitted v1.1 of Snowferno to the App Store for approval last night.

This update was built with the new Unity iPhone 1.5 and the latest iPhone SDK, bringing significant performance improvements across all devices. Gameplay is really smooth now on my iPhone 3G.

Also new in v1.1:

• New Leaderboard integration in-game with UIWebView
• New Tips community in-game -- powered by playhaven.com
• Fixed a few terrain bugs where you could get stuck (thanks, Belly Lint!)

And any Unity devs that want to know how Ben got UIWebView working in Unity, check out his blog post Playhaven, Unity, and Snowferno complete with downloadable sample AppController code.

Level 1: The Dark Wood
This is the standard "teaching" first level. All you need to do is figure out how to roll forward and turn just a bit to get into the exit.

Level 2: Little Jump
Here we have our first challenge. You are too small to get across the gap to the exit, so find some snow to get bigger. But dont take too long -- summer is coming and you'll melt!

Level 3: Switches
Here we see our first of many interactive items you'll encounter in the Inferno: switches. There are two on this level -- one on the floor that drops your platform down to the lower level, and another that lowers the drawbridge so you can cross to the finish.

We are pleased to announce the debut of Snowferno on the App Store, available immediately!

Late this afternoon, our server registered a new user playing v1.0.2. Only Apple had that version -- not even Ben! -- so I knew this was a good sign. About 90 minutes later, we got the email:

Your application is now Ready for Sale. If your contracts...

Woohoo! There it is. We submitted this build late evening of August 24. Approval this time took 9 days (7 business days), so the process appears to have recovered from whatever caused that mid-August slowdown. Two bugs, three builds, and nearly 6 weeks of waiting -- it's like a whole new game to us again!

We're already working on some updates, including building from the newly released Unity iPhone 1.5. We hope you enjoy!

It's been pretty quiet here while we have been waiting for the App Store to get to our 1.0.1 resubmit. Until this past Friday night when I got our second rejection. Man oh man.

...cannot be posted to the App Store because it is crashing on iPhone OS 3.0 and Mac OS X 10.5.7. Whenever the snowball falls off of the track the application crashes.

This was a new one to us, and again the crash logs were no help. However, we lucked out and it was a really quick fix. In short, some of the network reachability code Ben added after our first rejection introduced a new bug. And this time I was able to reproduce the crash, but only when the phone was in Airplane Mode. This would explain, however, why I have not registered any IP activity from new players. Are the App Store testers simply firewalled off, or could they actually be testing in Airplane Mode?

Anyway, with our network code patched up, I rebuilt a fresh v1.0.2 tonight and resubmitted.

For those keeping track (we sure are), we submitted v1.0.1 on August 5 -- 16 days (12 business days) until rejection. Our first rejection took 10.5 days (7 business days). Not a good sign that it's getting longer.

In the meantime, much news has been made these past two weeks about app delays, but Facebook 3.0 was submitted after us as well as Yahoo Messenger. So it appears to be just a heavy workload -- I'm thinking some August vacations have taken a few of those 40 App Store testers away from their 10-an-hour quota. There doesn't appear to be any other funny business or favoritism happening.

It's interesting to note as well that the App Store testers haven't been upgraded to 10.5.7 yet. Should we not have upgraded yet either? Or maybe they wait until a critical mass of iPhone users upgrade to 10.5.8 first....

(Three business days into the v1.0.1 resubmit and counting...)

In the meantime, I've been working on integrating the Snowferno Leaderboard with Twitter. Of course, that has been complicated by the DoS attack against Twitter over the last few days. But, it's coming along nicely and might even be ready to go live by the time we get our approval.

Our Twitter integration works basically like this:

1. Players who have setup their online leaderboard account (Settings > Score Board > Edit Leaderboard Settings) can click the "Sign in with Twitter" button and allow the Snowferno Leaderboard to access their Twitter account. At the same time, we ask the bit.ly API for a shortened URL to points to that player's Leaderboard profile.
2. Twitter sends us back OAuth tokens for that player's account, and we store those for future use. (OAuth incidentally is a really cool system. It's way too creepy these days to ask someone to give you their actual Twitter login and password. Using OAuth authentication, they only login to Twitter, whom they already trust. We avoid the security risks inherent in storing passwords, and players can revoke our app's permission whenever they want. Win/win/win (except for when Twitter throttles down OAuth to defend against DoS!))
3. During regular online gameplay, the Leaderboard API logs certain achievements (such as getting a Top 5 score for a level... more to come).
4. A cron script crawls the achievements log every minute and posts tweets on each player's behalf to the accounts that are Twitter-enabled. The reason I do the tweeting as a separate process was so that we could return global leaderboard data back to the game as quickly as possible.

The foundation of our integration is the PHP Twitter API wrapper twitter-async. The rest are custom additions to the Snowferno API and my Snowferno WP plugin.

Alot of the work on this has gone into getting the structures in place to gather and store authentication and making my cron script and achievements logger modular. (Also, my ongoing education in talking to APIs from inside and outside of the WordPress core.) Once the Twitter stuff is humming along nicely, I plan to delve into the Facebook Connect code and do something similar with Facebook statuses.

The big email finally came Sunday, August 2 at 1:24 PM EDT with the exciting subject "Snowferno 1.0.0: Application Submission Feedback".

Hello Brent,

At this time, Snowferno 1.0.0 cannot be posted to the App Store because it is crashing on iPhone OS 3.0 and Mac OS X 10.5.7.

Ouch.

I had done a Build and Run of v1.0.0 before submitting and it played just fine, so we knew the game itself was solid. I was away this weekend so Ben tried symbolicating the crash logs Apple sent us, but with no luck -- probably the crash was happening inside the Unity core of Snowferno. Also, being the Team Agent I have to do the final builds, so we didn't have a chance to get to this until last night.

Best we could tell, based on how far Apple said they were in the bootup when it crashed, it was probably a bug with the device having network access but not necessarily internet access -- we imagine that the App Store testing ground is heavily firewalled. I never recorded any game activity from Apple's IP addresses tho, so we know that it didn't get even get that far.

Ben went in and beefed up the networky bits and added some "no network found" messages if any of the WWW responses came back empty. We also took this chance to fix some not-terrible-but-glad-to-catch things like the end screen wasn't locked and the starting point on one level was left halfway into the level from a screenshot photo-op.

So, from v1.0.0 submit to rejection took 7 business days, or 10.5 actual days -- they did email us on a Sunday afternoon, after all. Not bad... We rebuilt last night and submitted v1.0.1 last night. Start the clock again at Wednesday, August 5. Tick tock...

P.S. I encountered this error when uploading the new binary:

The binary you uploaded was invalid. The signature was invalid, or it was not signed with an Apple submission certificate.

Well, I made sure the app was signed properly. Ben found this thread, and the solution for us was to change the Bundle Identifier in Info.plist from com.mycompany.${PRODUCT_NAME:identifier} to com.mycompany.Snowferno.