Publishing GameSalad Game into Apple iTunes Connect - The Learning Curve

It's been a while since I last blogged because the process of publishing our game has been monumentally difficult. When we were ready to publish we ran into issues in buying the GameSalad license. Apparently, the GS server wasn't working properly at the time and I was sent around in circles trying to purchase the license directly from GS or from Amazon. Eventually I gifted it to myself because it wouldn't work any other way. That proved a mess because I couldn't find straight answers on how to redeem the gift and was charged again when I accessed the gift account on Amazon. It was a mess. Things just aren't straight forward. There seems to be a lot of unnecessary hunting on GS.

Even within the forum, you can not simply plug in a phrase or word and call up entries that deal with the specific issue you are searching. I hope over time Gendai Games will work to improve user navigation and word search on the GameSalad site.

I did mange to get the license and move past that part, only to encounter another frustration when we tried to publish the game to GS.

Initially, we received an error message "No provisioning profiles found..."

Of course, we needed to go to the Apple Developer Center and download our Developer Certificate, Distribution Certificate and our Provisioning -> Distribution tab.  Aslo, we needed a WWDR (intermediate certificate) from Apple. Once we had filled out and downloaded these certifications, we put in them into the KEYCHAIN (on the computer ->applications->utilities->Keychain Access).

Then we went back into the GameSalad Program, into our actual game and clicked the orange Publish arrow to upload our game to GameSalad.

When we first tried this (and many subsequent times before speaking with GS) we received an error message. Eventually, we discovered with the help from the guys at GS that our project file was enormous because our images were huge.

HINT: When you build your game save the images you will use as "Save for Web and devices" from Photoshop. It will bring down the image size greatly. It is suggested that actors are below 100KB and backgrounds at 300KB or lower. We knew this going in, but by the time we published the game we had forgotten this golden rule. We believe the size of the file was creating the error message.

We had to go back and re-save ALL our images for Web, which reduced the project size from 198MB to 27MB! That was a huge savings. When we uploaded the file to GS it worked!

Initially, we had problems getting the file sent to Apple because of the file was rejected with an error message saying "The binary being uploaded does not contain an .app bundle". This ate our lunch for about five days because we didn't know what it meant and where to get the .app bundle it wanted.

Apparently, after we published in GS, we received a pop up window with three choices, "View in folder", "Manage portfolio", "What now?". We clicked on "Manage portfolio" and "downloaded" the published .gameproj file GS provided from the "Manage pportfolio" window, we zipped this file and this was the file we kept trying to publish to the Apple iTunes Connect site. 

BIG MISTAKE! Mind you the window "Manage Portfolio" has a big "Download here" sign, which has you believing that's what should happen. There aren't more straightforward directions on GS telling you that this isn't the window you want.

You do not want this .gameproj  file when uploading to Apple. This .gameproj file DOES NOT contain any of the .app bundle documents needed to publish to Apple, thus the reason for the error message from Apple when we tried to publish it.

Instead, we needed to click on the "View in Folder" window, which directed us to our designated folder - we had selected - to save the GS binary file when we clicked the "Publish" button. In that folder, we found a .app file that we had to compress into a .zip file. It is this .zip file we uploaded to Apple iTunes Connect. It went through.

Just remember: You do not need to use Xcode in any way to publish your GS.app file. Gendai Games has provided everything you would need to publish to Apple iTunes Connect in that .app file.  Now we are just waiting for Apple to approve our game and send us the notification that it is available in the iTunes App Store!

At the time of this writing, Google just released its new App Inventor Software for free. It too boasts no  coding required when building apps for the Android. I see the possibility of a new project just ahead. Thanks Gendai Games for the GameSalad software that helped us build our first app. It was truly an adventurous journey.