21Nov/112

fin by

As of today, Alien Swing is no longer on the app store. The developer agreement was due for renewal and it doesn't bring in enough money to make that renewal worthwhile.

It was fun to make and I learned a lot but, ultimately, it just wasn't successful.

Thanks to all those who purchased the game. I hope you'll continue to enjoy it.

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18Nov/100

Alien Swing goes bundled by

A while ago, Quokka Studios approached us about including Alien Swing in a bundle of games to be called an App Convoy. Finally, after a long line of setbacks to their plans, the AppConvoy Action Pack was finally released onto the app store today, containing the full versions of Alien Swing and six other indie games. The hope is that the weight of gaming goodness will be enough to deliver good sales and even at the small payout per unit we get turn Alien Swing into a financial success.

Quokka have also put together a second AppConvoy pack of puzzle games, the AppConvoy Puzzle Pack - we're not part of this one, but we wish them well with it none-the-less.

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2Apr/101

How to allow user background music with OpenAL by

Version 1.0 of Alien Swing has no music included, but also won't let you listen to your own music while you play. Since the iPod Touch and iPhone developed out of Apple's successful MP3 playing empire this seems rather suboptimal, so one of the things I've added in the 1.1 update is the ability to listen to your own music. This is actually a very straight forward thing to do, but I spent quite some time time tracking down how to do it, so here, reproduced for anyone else who wants to do it is how it's done: During your setup process, and before you call the OpenAL initialisation code, you need to add the following lines of code:

// Allow their music to play in the background
AudioSessionInitialize(NULL, NULL, NULL,NULL);
 
UInt32 sessionCategory = kAudioSessionCategory_MediaPlayback;
AudioSessionSetProperty( kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory, sizeof( sessionCategory ), &sessionCategory );
 
UInt32 allowMixing = true;
AudioSessionSetProperty( kAudioSessionProperty_OverrideCategoryMixWithOthers, sizeof( allowMixing ), &allowMixing );

These functions are included in AudioToolbox/AudioToolbox.h so make sure you're using the AudioToolbox framework and including that header in the appropriate file. The update to version 1.1 of Alien Swing was submitted to Apple on Monday but it's still in the 'waiting for review' state - I'm guessing this is because they're concentrating on getting all the iPad apps reviewed ready for release so it may be a while longer.

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1Mar/100

Stumbling out of the gate by

Alien Swing has been on the store for just over three weeks now, and we've had several fairly positive reviews (here, here and here), we were even briefly features under "New and Noteworthy" on the US store. But sales have been... lackluster, shall we say.

Unfortunately this has meant that there's not enough money coming in for me to continue working full time on this side of the business and I've had to take on some work for other people to balance the books. This means that further developments from Mr Jack Games will be stalled for a while.

All is not lost though, with Apple's new 20Mb 3G/EDGE download limit, we should be able to boost sales a little by trimming things down to fit under that threshold and I'm working on doing just that with a few nifty compression tricks. I've alse got a plan for a sort of "lite" version. I'm not a big fan of out and out lites for games at the bottom end of the price range; but I've got some ideas for creating a series of minigames using most of the same art assets and game mechanics as for the main game and putting out a "freemium" game featuring one of these games free for download and offering others as DLC at 99 cents a pop.

Hopefully this can help spread the word and get sales of Alien Swing back on track.

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5Feb/100

Promo trailer by

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3Feb/1011

Video (almost) direct from the iPhone by

Video of your game is kinda of a must have promotional tool but unfortunately there is no simple, sensible way to capture video from the iPhone. The earlier videos I posted where taken on a digital camera - but the quality just isn't there, even with a tripod and I don't fancy forking out for a flashy camera just to do that. Another alternative is to run it in the simulator and use software which will capture video from the Mac screen, trouble is with a game like Alien Swing that uses a lot of accelerometer control that doesn't quite work either. Still, making video can't be that hard, can it?

So I saddled up with OpenCV, and started capturing the screen with glReadPixels. Hmm... there's two problems here. The first is that the iPhone port of OpenCV doesn't include the video codecs needed. Bah, problematic, but not that critical - I can capture the screen, write it to the iPhone's flash memory and then knock up a command line tool on the mac to convert from this raw data into a sensible video format. Which leaves problem number 2: it's slow. Really, painfully slow. glReadPixels will capture the screen just fine but it knocks the frame rate down to an unplayably slow speed.

The solution: delta compression. We're fortunate in that most of the time most of the screen is unchanging in Alien Swing, this means I only need to capture and store the changes from the last recorded frame and save them off - a process known in the trade as delta compression. So, after a fair bit of effort I have video recorded from the iPhone device with the game running at 60fps (except during screen transitions and when it saves the captured data off). As you can see from the video below, it's not quite there yet - I've a few glitches to iron out - but the video should give you a decent impression of how the game plays.

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1Feb/101

Release date confirmed by

Alien Swing has passed review at Apple and will go on sale on Friday 5th February.

Needless to say, we're rather excited!

Filed under: General 1 Comment
27Jan/102

Submitted! by

Alien Swing is now with Apple for review. The plan is that I'll spend the next week and half getting a good looking website and some promo videos together and generally trying to pimp it to App Review sites and on iPhone forums before release on Friday 5th February.

Although that, of course, depends on it passing review nice and quickly.

Filed under: General 2 Comments
26Jan/100

And we’re there… almost by

222 check-ins and a lot of days later Alien Swing is now ready to submit.

Except Apple's site is down for improvements so I can't...

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7Jan/102

A few screenshots by

I haven't updated much lately, what with Christmas and New Year. Here's a few screenshots so you can see how the game is progressing:

Screenshots of game in progress

Screenshots of game in progress

Personally, I'm loving the look Rich's art is giving to the game.

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Mr Jack Games is a tiny indie games outfit founded by games industry veteran Jack Aidley in late 2009 to develop iPhone games. Our first game - Alien Swing - is now available on the App Store.

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