GameSalad iPhone game released - what we learned along the way

Well, I believe I am officially at the end of my first mobile game building experience. What a journey it has been. I started the project in January and now nearing the end of August, Bucky Challenge version 1.4 is out and ready for download in the iTunes App Store.

You may have noticed that I wrote version 1.4. It is true we did have corrections and it lead to four versions of our app being released. Much of it because we had great difficulty loading the game in an external device for testing. I have made the point of testing in the previous entry and I do know better than to release a game before testing it. However, we were under a time crunch because we had a news article about the game approaching publication.

Now as I look back over the eight months, I have some final thoughts regarding the things we learned while building the game.

1. We did choose to use command buttons to control actor actions in three of our levels. I believe this to be a less effective use of the iPhone environment. I would not recommend placing command buttons within a game for iPhone for several reasons. (a) Buttons eat into the screen real estate. The size of the buttons need to be large enough to accomodate fingertips of all sizes. (b) Buttons are a bit difficult to navigate on the device. (c) iPhone uses touch and accelerometer features that do work best on the iPhone, thus buttons seem antiquated. (d) The use of the buttons did cause in one case the iTouch device to turn off because of the location of the power button on the device being where the user places her hands. While holding the device, the player can accidentally click into a black screen saver mode, thus interfering with the game play. We never considered the possibility when we made the app and it didn't show up during the testing of the game. Fortunately, it is rare.

2. It is extremely important that all PNGs be "save for web" to reduce their size. Actors and elements should be less than 100kb with backgrounds no more than 300kb.

3. DO NOT build the game on several computers. We hade five team members each building a level on their own computer believing we could migrate to one computer and stitch the game together, but that does not work. GS provides original actor ID numbers for each element individually dedicated to one project. These do not copy over into a new project. We had to REBUILD each level and import all images into a new game to stitch them together.

4. GameSalad has its quirks and acts much like a beta, so do plan to experience some delays, crashes, and frustration. It takes a while to understand the game building psychology behind the program. Whereas, the GS forums do provide fairly quick responses to questions, the forums are not organized in a concise way by topic, issue, problem or error. It's time consuming navigating the forums for answers addressing specific problems. GS does have a number of tutorials (print and video), but there is no book on the software and many issues are difficult to find answers for. Beware, some answers provided in the forums are obsolete due to GS upgrades and may no longer be relevant or accurate, but they are still listed among the entries.

5. Do test your game on a device before publishing it because the game will not necessarily work according to the computer simulator generated version. It may work perfectly on the simulator, but not on the external device during testing. Furthermore, we experienced tremendous difficulty getting our game to play on an external device. Initially, we thought it was due to the Mac OS and Xcode versions not agreeing with each other, however, after considerable time installing Snow Leopard and the latest version of Xcode we were still unable to get the game to play. As a work-around we uninstalled Xcode and reinstalled Xcode several times. Eventually, it worked, but we never understood how it corrected itself or what was truly the problem.

Ultimately, we are very pleased with our game. It is the first of it's kind (sports game)for our University. Each team member can take pride in the knowledge they have contributed to the great iTunes App Store. There is a true sense of accomplishment seeing the game on display in the store, watching other people playing it, and learning from people we don't know that they downloaded it. That's so exciting. I believe it was a successful project, well worth the effort, and GameSalad was a good program choice.

In addition, we want to thank the people at GamesSalad, especially Jonanthan Samm, for helping us through some tricky issues.

We encourage and do hope that you, the reader, will download our game and provide feedback at iTunes or here on this blog. Just plug in Bucky Challenge in the search bar and Viola!. Please, cull through this blog's past entries when building your GS game for some troubleshooting advice and examples of challenges we faced. I truly hope this blog is of use to others.

As I turn my attention to the future, I have decided to build another app. I am looking at building a social network game for Facebook. Yep, you read that right. Initially, I spent some time looking for a SDK program specifically designed for or by Facebook, however, it is woefully sparse. That came as a shocker. Let's not forget, I am not a programmer by trade and the primary point of this blog is to document my experience as a Novice App Builder, using turnkey programs to build apps.

I have found one program. The Appainter program at http://www.appainter.com looks promising. If I choose to use that program it will become the next focus of this blog. I believe Facebook apps are extremely interesting to people and there doesn't seem to be a lot of straightforward information. (I could be wrong.)

So, onward and upward.