“Dreams will come true. Again.”

I’ve not much to say, but the website about Galcon 3 does! Let’s make this happen.

-Phil

Ahoy there! I’ve released a new game called Galcon BOTS! It’s coding game!

Even if you don’t code, the live stream is fun to watch!

-Phil

Ahoy there! If you’re going to be at GDC, you should check out my talk during the Indie Game Summit on Tuesday afternoon! It’s going to be an exciting “tell-all” of all the never-before revealed secrets of Galcon!

Galcon: A Quest for the Perfect Triangle

Anyway, GDC is always a blast! I’m also going to be demoing my new game Anathema Mines throughout the week to anyone who will check it out. Here’s a screenshot of the gameplay 🙂

Cheers!
-Phil

The Steam Summer Camp sale is on and Galcon Fusion has a new achievement to celebrate!

“Pool Party” – Win 5 Rounds of Multi-player Billiards! I’ve just tripled the number of Billiards servers to accomodate the mad rush

If you haven’t purchased Galcon Fusion on Steam yet, it has SteamPlay (Mac & PC) support and is on sale at 66% off today for only $3.40 .

Have fun playing!
-Phil

P.S. in other crazy news, I’ve been doing an indie game dev video blog with some other cool folks! Look through the videos, I talk about Galcon and discuss what I think about varios aspects of being an indie dev. Other devs include Mike Hommel who created “Robot Wants Kitty” which was one of my favorite games last year, as well as Andy Moore who created Steambirds and is involved in re-tooling Galcon Flash. Check it out and subscribe if you find it interesting.

So I’ve been working on an Android tuneup for Galcon over the past couple days. Here’s what’s been going on:

– Some users were having the game hang on them when the phone went to sleep. There were two issues here, one was a deadlock situation because I had onPause “synchronized” and I wasn’t using the wakelock to keep the device from falling asleep. I fixed the deadlock and I added the wakelock feature so that the device does not fall asleep while you are waiting for a round to end or whatever. To sleep your device you have to press the sleep button now.

– In Android 2.3.3 the ability to scroll up and down the server list was somehow broken. It seems that the ability to track motion was somehow changed in the new version. Also, my code in the previous version didn’t handle things well anyways. So I’m just tracking motion manually and that seems to have fixed the issues in the game.

– I’ve also tested Galcon on the Xoom and it works pretty well!

I hope you enjoy the update! Please tell me if there are any odd side-effect issues that result from the fixes I’ve put in.

… And to celebrate, Galcon for Android is on sale for $0.99! So now would be a good time to spread the word about Galcon on the Android!

-Phil

P.S. A special thanks to Google for giving me a Xoom tablet at GDC! It’s great having the whole gamut of Android devices to test on now 🙂 The devices I have are the G1, Droid, Nexus One, and Xoom.

Hey,

Galcon Fusion is available now on the Mac App Store at the amazing launch price of 99c – that’s 90% off the regular desktop price!

I’m also doing a Mega-Sale across many of the other versions of Galcon! Be part of the “Galcon Community Rejuvenation Project” and help get the word out about this Mega-Sale:

Galcon Fusion for the Mac – 99c – Regularly $9.99

Galcon Fusion for the iPad – 99c – Regularly $4.99

Galcon for the iPhone – 99c – Regularly $2.99

Galcon Labs for the iPhone – 99c – Regularly $2.99

Galcon for Android – 99c – Regularly $2.99

Have fun playing!
-Phil

So, I’m whipping through the Mac App Store port of Galcon Fusion today. Most of the documentation on the Apple site is pretty clear, but I’ll document the few stumbles I had in case it helps anyone else. Thankfully a few web searches found the answers to most of my questions pretty quickly.

1. The Certificate file selected is invalid

While using the App Store Developer Certificate Utility I got this error message “The Certificate file selected is invalid” .. The problem was I was using Chrome. By switching back to Safari to finish the web-wizard, I got past this error in a few moments. Original article.

2. Unable to copy dSYM file into archive

While attempting to Build and Archive my app I got the error “Unable to copy dSYM file into archive.” with the suggestion that I “Please make sure that your application has set the “Debug Information Format” build setting to “DWARF with dSYM File”.” I also confirmed that “Generate Debug Symbols” was checked.

I had already made this change, and I double checked it via Project > Edit Project Settings > Build > .. However, this didn’t seem to fix it, so I did a search and found this article. I found it to be somewhat cryptic, but I went and tried Project > Edit Active Target > instead. I found the “Generate Debug Symbols” was unchecked from this view. If anyone knows the difference I’d appreciate understanding what I was doing right / wrong here. Anyway it now “Build and Archive” without any trouble.

3. The use of non-public APIs is not permissible, as documented in section 2.5 of the App Store Review Guidelines.

“Using private APIs can lead to a poor user experience should these APIs change in the future. The non-public API (CPSEnableForegroundOperation, CPSGetCurrentProcess, CPSSetFrontProcess) that is included in your application comes from the following private Apple frameworks – ApplicationServices.framework.”

Okay, this hasn’t actually happened to me, it happened to Mike Kasprzak. He found that SDL had an #ifdef in its SDLMain.m which enabled some undocumented APIs being used. By commenting out “#define SDL_USE_CPS” he was able to resubmit and avoid the rejection notice. Mike also mentioned that SDL 1.3 doesn’t have this issue, but it’s still in beta and somewhat incomplete.

4. After trying to manually install my app, it didn’t appear in /Applications

After using the Organizer to Share > Save As .. > my app, I used the command line “install” command to try and install it. My app didn’t appear in /Applications. It didn’t seem to go anywhere sensible. I found that to force it to go to /Applications you just have to manually delete all the other places it tries to install it, and eventually when it can’t find your app anywhere to overwrite it, it’ll install into /Applications properly.

5. Adding support for CMD-Q and CMD-F

One thing I had to do was add support for standard Apple command keys. I guess it’s about time! Mike tipped me off that Apple checks for those and I’d best have them properly supported in my app.

6. Adding receipt validation

I implemented some receipt validation, but upon trying running my application I got this error:

“This is not a Test User account. / Please create a new account in the Sandbox environment. [Environment: Sandbox]”

I found this tip on a website: “(You can) create a test user in iTune connect by logging on iTune Connect –> Select Manage Users –> Test User –> Add New User –> Fill in the required data for your test user. We will be using this test users to see if our receipt validation code is working properly.”

Apple strongly encourages obfuscating your code for the receipt validation. I’m no expert on this, but I heard that using blocks helps. This article showed me the blocks syntax, which I found pretty easy to pick up. (Blocks are a sort of lambda for C code.)

7. Submitting the app

When submitting I got a variety of incoherent error messages. Bottom line is you can’t have spaces in your package name. Basically in Organizer you have to save to disk with a name with _’s instead of spaces then upload using the application loader. Here’s the thread that explains it.

Hey,

Thanks for all the responses to my survey a few weeks ago! That is going to be a huge help in figuring out what I’m going to be doing this year.

The Galcon update I put out a few weeks ago with retina and multitasking support could use some reviews on the App Store It’d be swell if you could write something up:

Galcon | Galcon Labs | Galcon Fusion

Also, I’m going to GDC in San Francisco from Feb 28-March 4. If anyone is interested, it would be fun to get together for a Galcon meetup. I’ve put together a little survey to get a feel for who wants in on the fun!

The Galcon in SF Meetup survey

Thanks!
-Phil

Take the Galcon Survey, it should only take about 3 minutes and you’ll be helping me decide what will be best for Galcon in 2011!

Thanks!
-Phil

P.S. I added a few questions since last night, so if you already filled it out, you may want to edit your response.

I’ve updated Galcon, Galcon Labs, and Galcon Lite for the iPhone / iPod touch with retina display support and multi-tasking support. I’ve also updated Galcon Fusion on the iPad with multitasking support. Now you can play more than one game of Galcon at a time! I’ve also updated the desktop version of Galcon Fusion with a number of bug fixes. For those of you who don’t know the difference between non-retina and retina displays, this image will help you understand:

Enjoy the update!
-Phil

P.S. Okay, that “before” image is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea