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:

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.

I added a one-stop Media Kit page to the site yesterday.

In anticipation of our pending App Store approval (and on the heels of our first review from No DPad), we wanted to be nice to the people who we hope will write nice things about Snowferno. It would be just mean to make them gather up all the bits themselves.

So, I put copies of all the good stuff on one page -- screenshots, MP3 excerpts from the game soundtrack, YouTube gameplay trailer URLs and most-common embed codes, our app icon, and even just the basics like our names and App Store link.

Going even further, everything found on the page can be had as a one-click .zip archive download.

Every page on snowferno.com has a link to the Media Kit on the footer navbar in the bottom-right corner.

Snowferno RC2(.5) became version 1.0.0 tonight. The binary is built and submitted. Some late in-house testing found teensy things that needed fixing, and the rest of the night Ben trained me how to build Xcode projects. :)

We also (finally) assembled our screen shots, which were picked out of video Ben captured in ScreenFlow, and we wrote up the iTunes sidebar text.

Oh, and that one big final detail: price! Snowferno will sell for $1.99.

While we wait for Apple approval, we want to give a big thanks to all our beta testers. While we worked out the bugs, some versions allowed unfair "advantages" on some levels, so to even the playing field we're going to reset the leaderboard to bRC2 and after. That also means our developer scores are being reset as well, so here's your chance to get in some scores ahead of benbritten. :)

Your unlocked levels will stay unlocked, but if you want your scores to count on the leaderboard, make sure you've playing bRC2 or later!

I put the finishing touches on the Leaderboard yesterday, and it is now live. Snowferno.com has been collecting game scores all during the beta period, so we already have a nice heap of data.

Congrats (so far...) to Baller77718 who leads the pack, and quite definitively -- although s/he has yet to conquer all 20 levels.

Some key features of the Leaderboard:

• Recently Played games gives a snapshot of the last few levels completed worldwide
• All-Time Top 5 by Level lists the best 5 scores for every level, mirroring what you see in-game on each "Level Complete" screen.
• Top 50 Completed Games sums up the best times by level for the brave snowballs that have conquered the Inferno.
• Click on any screen name to view that player's game stats and recently played levels. Stats include that player's best level times, total attempts, fallouts, meltouts, wins, their win %, and the score ranking per level.
• Personalized screen names are coming very soon, so you won't have to be your auto-assigned Inferno character forever.

Global Leaderboard participation is voluntary. "Post Scores" is enabled by default when you first launch Snowferno. To change your preference, be sure your device has Internet access, then tap Settings > Score Board from the main screen and toggle the setting there. NOTE: this does not delete your scores, it only changes whether your scores are displayed to the public. You can enable or disable "Post Scores" ad nauseam to suit your fancy. :)

Let us know what you think - comments are welcome: improvements, (errors?), suggestions for more Snowferno data mining goodness... I have been playing around with some graph-drawing libraries, but all the charts I've made so far are pretty ugly. But look for possible future improvements in that direction, too.

For the technically curious, the Leaderboard is powered by a custom WordPress plugin that hooks into the handy filters and actions provided by the WordPress core. Our own custom API gathers and stores the Leaderboard data in supplementary tables alongside the WordPress data.

I originally tried to find an off-the-shelf WordPress plugin for this functionality, but I found that the "community" aspect of WordPress is one area (admittedly, I think) that it is lacking. WP is a terrifically flexible foundation, and just having the blog and account management functions at our fingertips has been an immense time-saver. Now that we've built our first game website, maybe for future projects we'll look at a WordPress MU, Drupal, or very likely the highly-anticipated, 2.0 CodeIgniter rewrite of ExpressionEngine.