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...)
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 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:
- 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.
- 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!))
- During regular online gameplay, the Leaderboard API logs certain achievements (such as getting a Top 5 score for a level... more to come).
- 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.
