GameSalad - Testing game on external device/Pull app from iTunes

Since I last wrote, we did get our app up, but not running, in iTunes App Store under - Games>Sports>Free> "Bucky Challenge". It was so exciting seeing it listed. I was excited until I read the two comments under the game that rated it poorly because it was too hard to play. Mind you, this app wasn't in the store 12 hours before the reviews were in, so I suspect they came from people at iTunes who tested it. Honestly, that's pure conjecture because I have no way of knowing, but I was shocked to see two reviews first thing in the morning when the app got posted some time in the middle of the night.

Needless to say, it was disheartening to see the app get the low ratings. I immediately tested the game on my iTouch and had each team member try to play the game. Sure enough the first level wasn't working properly. I immediately pulled the game from the iTunes App Store and brought it back into GameSalad to review the rules.

**I need to mention here that we did not test our game on an external device before we published it. Of course, it seems completely reasonable and due diligence to test an application BEFORE releasing it, but it ran well in the program so we thought nothing of it. However, let me say that it is critical to test the game because the functions in GS don't necessarily work according to plan in the application once published and running on a device.

In fact, our game uses directional buttons on at least three of our five levels. Two of the levels require the actor to jump over other actors. Our jumping behavior was too extreme, thus not allowing the actor to move over other actors before falling back down on the actor it was jumping. The player lost a life for each actor it hit. With only three lives, the player would lose the level fairly quickly. The jumping action wasn't moving directionally left or right, just up and down. We eventually fixed this, but for the purposes of this blog, here is a tutorial on jumping http://gamesalad.com/wiki/how_tos:gsc_jump. http://gamesalad.com/wiki/faqs?force_rev=1

We did trace the rules and discovered something missing. We added another rule that allowed the jumping function to work, while the directional keys are pressed and we lessened gravity so that the actor wouldn't fall so quickly. We hope this works. The optional word here is hope.

We still didn't test our game. Why you might ask? Because all of our iTouch devices are updated to the latest version of iTunes, while our Mac OS is Leopard, not Snow Leopard. The newest version of XCode works with Mac OS 4 and the external device needs to have OS 3.1.3 or higher to work with Mac OS4.

Because we don't have the newest version of the MacOS we could not connect with the device to download the test version of our game to the device to test the game. Yep, that's right. Though we know it to be extremely bad practice to release a game without testing, we did republish the game to iTunes again without testing it.

Here's another bit of information you need to know. We tried to republish our game to GS in order to upload it to iTunes, but we encountered an error message. We found out that GS doesn't allow earlier versions of the program (before 0.8.8) to be published. We had refused to upgrade to the newest version of GS because we were nervous that our game would lose some settings and not function properly. It has happened before when we upgraded. Fortunately, that was not the case this time.

**Remember, work with the latest version of GS when you go to publish, otherwise you might run into an error message preventing you from publishing.

I am posting a link here to some tutorials that might help you to publish. The following link shows a video tutorial by Tshirtbooth on how to get your game onto an external device.

http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:building_gamesalad_viewer#how_do_i_install_the_gamesalad_viewer_on_my_iphone

http://gamesalad.com/wiki/developing_for_iphone:preparing_for_build

We shall see what the future holds for us. If again our game doesn't function properly we will be upgrading to Snow Leopard and hooking up our device to test. Wish us luck.