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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

------

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.

------

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.

-----

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