Its raining outside

Interview this morning with the 7 Days.

Went pretty well, nice to do some marketing on our end. We are doing pretty well on the marketing end already, thanks to the Polygon Article. Have seen 3 or 4 since!

We have received the list of media hubs that have confirmed that they will be writing something, which is awesome.

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Moving through the last of our bug list for Update #2, we should be good to go with it right after the retina display version gets approved.

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Finally have gotten some traction on the trailer. Marguerite picked up a camera yesterday, shot some footage around the building with a few random people. We also took it to testing to grab additional footage.

So a new trailer should be rolling out for Pathogen next weekish.

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Lastly, Pathogen Launch Party!

Yep, if your reading this your invited. Its happening on November 8th from 6 - 9 at our building (47 Maple St) We will be showcasing the game, projecting it onto the walls/floors/etc & generally celebrating the release!

Press!!!!!

Umm what!!!!!!!

Woke up this morning, was preparing to make my chilly bike ride past the graveyard only to double take at my phone when I saw that we were on polygon!!!!!

http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/29/5044094/viral-strategy-title-pathogen-launches-for-ios-nov-7

Yay! Press!

Its too bad that we don't have a newer trailer up or that the screenshot is kinda fuzzy, but we are already feeling the ripples of that article. Had a few other Press people express interest in getting a look at the game & another article went up an hour ago on App Spy.

http://www.appspy.com/news/7862/pathogen-an-intriguing-game-of-cellular-combat

This is pretty amazing, especially since its just kinda out of no where. We handed the promo codes to Triple Point last week & didn't quite know what was going to happen.

Kinda surreal, but we needed the buzz to start building.

Analytics!

Once again push notifications have become a pain.

We did learn that Flash can natively push notifications, no external libraries needed. Which is nice, however it is dependent on the traditional Flash Stage, which we do not use in Starling.

So for the moment, we are going to move on. But we are still going to release a quick 1st week patch with the work that I have been doing.

The move to Starling 1.4.1 has optimized a few things, allowing a smoother experience for iPhone users. This update will also include the work I did today: analytics.

Utilizing a library created by Stick-Sports, Pathogen is now logging player data to Flurry. This flexible tool set allows me to track a variety of different data that we can use to help shape the game experience. How long is the median time for a level? What level are players giving up on? Which is the most difficult? What difficulty are they playing on? How many people on average play in a local game? And so many more questions we will be able to answer with the data the game returns to us.

This is the kind of stuff I love looking over. Our first game, Loc, was built with this kind of thing in and it really helped to polish the difficulty curve of the experience.

On top of the service that Flurry provides, Flox will also help to map the average play session of a user, look at retention rates, etc.

Think of these services as a heart beat monitor. By watching the data you can see the state of the game & know when/where you need to react in order to keep it healthy.

& for those of you who haven't seen this: http://vimeo.com/9985840

Update #1 Down, onwards to Update #2

So we pushed the Retina build out the door.

Hopefully, if all the timing works out, this will be the release build of the game.

Marguerite is tackling the trailer this week as Matt & I continue to push forward with development. We are now officially on Update #2.

We are at a cross roads at the moment as we try to decide which direction we want to go in. We can either try  to get another fast build out the door that would add Push Notifications for players, which would be a quality of life change for online play. You would get alerts when a player joins your game, an invite arrives or a game is complete.

But its being a bit uncooperative/we don't completely understand how to do this. So this update may be rolled into the larger one looming on the horizon, Ranked Play.

Ranked Play is a feature we were originally looking at including on Launch to Online, but due to time constraints decided to delay its implementantion.

The goal of the system is to create a competitive environment within the game, allowing players to play against others of a similar skill. Wins & losses would be tracked on a seasonal leader-board & other fun stuff like that.

but until we know how much of an effort it will take to get push notifications into Pathogen we wont start planning out those systems.

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In other news we are finally moving to Starling 1.4.1, we had been stuck on 1.3 for a while. This comes with some great general performance improvements for mobile devices!

Update #1

Just because the core game is finished, that doesn't mean we are done.

Its onward to Update #1!

And as I said yesterday I wanted to focus on optimizing for Retina Display. So what is Retina?

Retina is basically a fancy way of saying that a device has a very high resolution. In particular, Retina display iPads (anything above the iPad 2) have a resolution of 2048x2048. When we built Pathogen, all of our assets were optimized for 1024x1024, so that we knew it would function without a problem on lower quality devices like the iPad 2 & iPhones. On HD devices, those assets were simply scaling those assets up to fit on the screen. If you look hard, you can tell that they are a little fuzzy on HD devices.

So how are we going to get assets that look good on an HD screen. If we had not created the assets in Flash, we would actually have to go back to drawing board & recreate them from scratch. But, because the assets were made in Vector all I had to do is go back to the original, scale it up & export it back out. Within 6 hours, all of our animations had been converted. Yay Flash.

All I have to do is code in a check at the very beginning of the application to see if the device its on is HD or not. If so, it will load in the HD sprites instead of the standard sprites.

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Matt has also been working on some quality of life fixes for more advanced players. You can now change the animation speed in the game, doubling it, or even opting to remove the animations all together for even faster play.

One of the things you might first notice as well is the inclusion of a boarder surrounding the whole game board. This boarder display is something I added so that anyone can easily identify whose turn it currently is, even at a glance.

Done.

Its done.

Yes, Pathogen hit gold-master last Friday.

And its feeling pretty good. That was a major milestone. But we didn't stop there. All day Friday & Saturday we were at the Vermont Tech Jam showing people the game and trying to drum up some local interest. We ended up giving away 250+ fliers with the games information about it.

Yesterday we suspended work, went out to a late breakfast and had a post-mortem about the whole of Pathogen's development.

I have a lot of really good notes that I want to put into a easier to digest form before sharing them with all of you. So that will happen down the road at some point in time.

For right now, its own to stage 2 of Pathogen's development. We will be working away on the first update to the game which will include some quality of life changes.

1. Retina Display: All you HD iPad owners will be able to experience Pathogen in full retina display.
2. Push Notifications: Pop up notifications that will alert you when an online game has been started, ended, or is your turn.

We hope to have these changes out pretty quickly, potentially before the game releases, but we will see.

Unexpected Changes

Yesterday was a little hectic, pulled in too many ways, trying to get builds out to Gameblyr & to us. This has been complicated itself ever since we transferred ownership of the App of to them.

This has a surprisingly large impact & one we didn't completely comprehend until after we did it. By transferring the App, we lost all means of creating new builds with our Apple Developer Profile. That means no new devices may be added since all provision profiles & certificates attached to Pathogen also vanished.

If there are new people who need to get their hands on the game we need to do so through Gameblyr's Developer Account.

But its all worked out, in a very stable place right now.

So lets talk about something different, how we have been tracking our issues. As you have seen in the last post we just do it all in a list. Normally a development studio would use some kind of issue tracking service, ie: Mantis. Where a ticket is created per issue. These issues each have their own status that is updated as the issue is worked on.

While this is a great tool, we don't really need something that comprehensive. The thing is that its only Matt & I working on this. So a Google doc is really all we need, we can both be adding to/crossing off items from the list without conflict. But maybe next project, it would help us get a little more organized.

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Getting the feeling I want to do a post mortem soon, maybe on Monday we will all sit down & do that.

Ack, its Monday

So its Monday. We are going to try to get this thing out to Apple by Friday. Oh boy...

Not to meant that we need to be ready for the Vermont Tech Jam as well, which I'm supposed to be at on Friday & Saturday. Marguerite will be speaking at a panel as well.

Worked through the weekend on tweaking the tutorial & fixing a few of the campaign bugs we ran into on Friday. I would say that overall we are in a good place.

Added in a "tips" popup, for lack of a better word. It appears when the player attempts to make an illegal move & lets them know that Hey, your making a bad move, try again (ok, maybe not that condescendingly). A sound effect would be nice to go with it, but eh maybe later.

Our kill sheet is getting rather long, 165 issues in 2 weeks is not too bad.

Pathogen Checklist

To Do:

1. Facebook & Twitter Icons
2. Graphics critique pass on Online
3. Final Music & SFX
1. Music
1. Menu Soundtrack
2. Ingame_01
3. Ingame_02
2. SFK
1. Selector sounds
2. Expanded Cascade
3. Win/Loss Condition
4. Complete the Zoom Feature
5. Swap out Achievement Text
6. General Optimization
7. Loader from Animation.
8. Temp User Icon
9. Achievement Icon - 512x512
10. Game Center Icon w/o BG
11. “Rate This App”
12. Add Push Notifications
1. Your turn
2. Game invite
3. Game Over
13. Fix Rendering of Dot Lines on Campaign screen
14. Add back button to campaign sublevels | Necessary?
15. Trigger an End State on campaign
16. Update iTunes Connect w/ New Screenshots (4, 5, iPad) & Icons - Can only be done during an App Update
17. Change over iTunes ownership to Gamblyr
18. Change over FLOX ownership to Gamblyr
19. Change over UrbanAirship ownership  to Gamblyr
20. Invites only to players who have Pathogen
21. Redesign Level 3 (Locked Down)
22. Redesign Level 5 (The Nuclear Option)? | Change AI difficulty first
23. Cells get permanently stuck with a White Flash in some tutorial levels
24. AI is playing a turn after Victory condition is met
25. Alignment Problems with Completing a level on medium difficulty.
26. Ai is too difficult on Medium & Easy settings
27. Capture Zone Optimization
28. Lengthen the gap between when a player's turn ends & the AI’s begins
29. AI’s should not be able to earn players an achievement
30. Players should win tie games in the campaign
31. The achievement for completing a “world” is being triggered after any level is complete.
32. AI ran out of valid moves, stops game progression
33. Retrying a level does not properly dispose of data?
34. More useful Error Screen when connecting to online
1. No Online connection
2. Not signed into Game Center.
35. Align Cell Selector White Flash
36. After click on map in Game Setup, highlight Next button. Do same on Player selection after pick a player?
37. Double check functionality of Erosion Zone, Player cells disappearing after the zone has opened up?
38. Finishing the right hand “path” does not unlock the last level.
39. Confirm button text placement on iOS
40. Player name text size in OnlinePlayer on HD iPads
41. Percentage Bar In-accurately showing player %'s
42. Add Domination victory in Online
43. “NULL has surrendered” - does not pull in accurate player nickname/alias
44. No win from surrendered game, Victor, on Player Profile
45. No cells updated from surrendered game, victor, on Player Profile
46. Cell did not update correctly? When transforming to Squares? - Picture.
47. If a higher evolved cell is selected & played makes an invalid move, the piece disappears.
48. Images not getting correctly getting removed.
49. Determining whose turn it is? - Players swapped? 2x
50. Connecting to internet on “awake” Recheck for internet when clicking online
51. Simple game summaries, font size on iOS HDD
52. forfeiting a game takes a seriously long time.
53. In online, if use a 2nd or 3rd level cell, and only have one, it disappears properly, but then is gone, so the whole row is blank until next turn
54. If a Games Status is Over, when a player goes to remove it do NOT warn them that doing so will result in a loss.
55. Integrate Social Media into Online
56. Tweak Cell Selector White Flash
57. Online Game Previews, formatting for iPhone.
58. After removing a game, open the custom Games window again.
59. Cell indicator when receive 2nd or 3rd tier cell needs to detect if 2 cells visible, and if so, highlight on right, not in middle
60. Solid cells - when return to game - are misaligned
61. Returning to Games List from iPhone
62. iPhone 4/5 Alignment Issues
63. Tile Indicator is in top left corner if join an online game and 1st player has not taken a turn
64. Nemesis == Null on Profile Screen.
65. Make player not found error in Main more graceful. If doesn’t find player, do something that alerts BWG and the player. - added error checking.
66. Make game loading problem in EntityManager more graceful - if finds GamePlayer records but no corresponding Game records, it bails back to Main. Needs to still get to online.
67. When accept invite, go into game, but nickname is blank
68. Should Accept Invite be on top, and Reject on bottom?
69. - Online Victory Doesn't work, Half fades in before Crashing, doesn't send results to other player.
70. - Other players turn, but player forfeits from the Online Play screen. results in Freeze, does not send forfeit results to other player. - made liveupdate run for player whose turn it is. Need to test.
71. Cell Selector White Flash is not centered when currentNumofSaved == 0 in Online Play.
72. Players Switched colors.
73. App Annie Integration
74. Cell Selector disappears when one is used when 2 have been saved.
75. Investigate AI use of cells. Appears to be able to use multiple higher level cells without losing them.
76. Players Switching Colors
77. Confirm Button Text is offset
78. Cell Selector White Flash is not centered when currentNumofSaved == 0 in Local Play Replay.
79. Game Board in Local Play not centered on second game
80. When forfeiting from Online Play Screen & its not your turn, the opposite player forfeits instead.
81. Test Invitations on Medium & Large Maps
82. Test Unfriending a Friend via Game Center
83. Test RateBox with another app (Loc)
84. Accept Invite Text in Online Play is offset
85. Particle effects need to be scaled to pathogen.Scale for Victory/Defeat screens in Online Play for HD devices & iPhone.
86. Change out Default Splash Images?
87. Edit Icon
88. Campaign, cannot touch screen on place cells
89. Crash entering Online for a second time after leaving a match on both devices that were in that game
90. Visual bug on three finger pinch to minimize screen - continuing to tap enlarges circle - still playable (IF PINCHED WHEN OTHER PLAYERS MOVE IS PLAYING OUT)
91. While screen is “pinched” other player cannot move
92. Quickly switching between level 1 and 2 - playing evolution animation on both screens, fixes when evolved
93. Online game did not pass move to other player
94. All Buttons Broken after crash in campaign
95. When opening game after crashing campaign, no placing available in ANY board scenario
96. Local Play, cannot touch screen on place cells
97. *POLISH* Solid (tier 4) neutral cells grow / highlight as if you can place on them. Same for opposing player’s solid cells (tier 4)
98. *POLISH* Player 2 recieved a new cell (tier 2) and took their turn. The flashing highlight stopped on their device, but not on Player 1’s device (multiple turns later it still hasn’t gone away)
99. Victory/Defeat Cell has black lines running through it. (Single pixel offset like before?)
100. Question mark / Tutorial button didn’t disappear after completing a random match. (normal victory condition NOT domination)
101. Enter Game is offset on HD ipad & ipad Mini
102. *POLISH*Background alpha on a game holder in the list doesn’t reset when released from a move
103. *POLISH* multiple games can be selected at once (display selected state w/ buttons)
104. View Results text is offset on HD ipad
105. Singleplayer button text is offset on both iPad mini & HD iPad
106. Player name text on game holder in games list is the incorrect size on HD iPad (not scaled up)
107. Singleplayer, multiplayer, maps button no longer works. To repeat open the options tab and then closed it (on main menu)
108. Outmanned - 1  Fill the board, BUT LOSE and the game doesn’t end. undo & help button work, but when I tried to quit the game froze, BUT didn’t crash
109. After online game clicked to view stats, but screen didn’t pop up. Current display - blank background with help button (after successful test with player queue) *Repeatable when I go to view the game from games list*
110. Crash in Campaign from losing to the AI.
111. Update BW Splash Screen.
112. Include Gameblyr Splash Screen.
113. Completed Lighting - 1 The stats screen had 0 minutes for elapsed time. I had retried the level. (repeatable)
114. Achieved “Harmful - Destroy 100 Cells” when the AI used a virus on my cells
115. Elapsed Time on Lightning Levels is incorrect. States the games took between 0-1 minutes. (Doing exact time check when I’m back)
116. Switch Push Note Code over to Production
117. Uncomment Rate Box, Set Day Delay
118. Wipe Online Data
119. Campaign Debug == False
120. iTunes Description Text
121. Take out Trace Statements
122. Undoing while in Tutorial levels where you must play in certain locations will break the game.
123. Auto start first level
124. iPhone 5 Resolution
125. Control zone countdown does not’ reset properly when undoing a move. Control zone transformed, I undid that turn, and it didn’t transform again.
126. Part of above - the player & AI pieces that are in the control zone cannot have cells placed on them. (potentially just a graphic glitch?)
127. Part of above - those cells can be spread on to though AND will upgrade the control zone if player takes 100%
128. part of above - counter goes negative
129. *POLISH* Normalize mode name to “Capture Zone” or “Control Zone.”
130. Virused Control Zone cells don’t always reset to correct graphic (some become blank board piece) some percentage of these didn’t transform at the end of the count down
131. part of above - game didn’t end because of un-transformed control zone cells
132. Memory clean up with Control Zone’s (seemed to get laggy even when they hadn’t broken)
133. sub-levels size and placement off on HD iPad
134. Save data with campaign
135. Update spreading for Online
136. Erosion Zone, Destroying cells that are not part of the perscribed Zone - level 2 of that world - Double check code that determines Erosion Zones
137. Only pulse new cell three times or so, confusing which is selected which it pulses non-stop
138. Scoot difficult dots up slightly on individual worlds
139. Back button on campaign to get back to main
140. Got achievement “win game through domination” when the AI won, counted as a win on the campaign
141. Ai Playing on Board Boundaries?
142. Ai refused to make a move, tried to undo, continued to Undo back to the AI’s turn.
143. Parent Levels will slide around (and scale incorrectly) when you tap and slide immediately after. Scale does not return to normal upon leaving focus.
144. Games list screen does not display “Random Match” Button & “Invite Friends” Button - on iPad Mini, started after exiting an online game. Persists after exiting and restarting the app. Persists after restarting the device too. (repeated on HD iPad too. see below)
145. you can break/freeze the game by swiping and clicking on the invite friends button as the games list page loads after leaving an online game. - The invite friends screen will pop-up over the games list screen and you can go back (closes invite friends display), but then it freezes. Potentially related to 145, as I tried swiping after leaving a game and the games list screen no longer had the 2 buttons.
146. Not sure if this is a bug or intentional… you can’t place viruses on neutral cells
147. Cannot click multiplayer after opening achievements page
148. Keep the Random & Friend buttons on the online screen, even when the player has 3 currently active games. When these buttons are pressed, prompt with a window alerting them to the fact that they cannot have more than 3 active games.
149. Cascade update to Virtual Turns
150. BWGTester & BWGtester02 Broke it!
1. Pushed a move, didn’t appear on the other players screen. Player who pushed recieved a null? When player returned to the Game List it showed that it was still his turn. Tried to play again, same result.
2. Other Games will work however.
151. Show a message for a illegal Move.
152. Domination Victory text in Online.
153. Add in Achievements into Online
154. Join cell names with hyphen “A-Cell” “B-Cell” - feels more unified like a title
155. Period after “Complete to map to progress”
156. Pulse the Charger Bars when discussing them?
157. Darken screen more on Victory?
158. Add “You can” before “conquer enemy cells”??
159. Start with B-Cell not C-Cell
160. Then move onto C-Cell
161. Undo at the end?
162. Higher Res images of the Cells Types for close-ups? - Evaluate remaining spritesheet space for loader / other items
163. Once virus is tapped say what action it will take.
164. “Viruses” not Virus’s, that or “The Virus destroys”
165. Change “Campaign” to “Single Player”??

Known Issues:

1. Gap in Victory Screen rendering on HD iPADs
2. Graphics issue with text display/formatting on iOS
3. Large player created Maps difficulty loading
4. Clicking on Online Play will sometimes drop you into a floating background for an extended period of time due to server/internet connection speed.

Other Tasks:

1. Play through entire campaign
2. Test Achievements
3. Website Adjustments
4. New Trailer

Additional Features:

1. Challenge Your Nemesis? - set up structure. - REJECTED
2. Show who you are Dominating? functionality built. just need to know how it should look
3. Change layout of Post Game screen? Put Graph & Pie chart on the same screen? | REJECTED
4. Hints? On how to succeed in the game?
5. Rematch players in Game Over Menu for Online?