I'm pretty happy with them. I play a helicopter noise while flying, and I have an explosion noise for when you crash.

The game volume can be controlled by the volume buttons, but I haven't added anything to the settings page to save preferences (like muted) yet.

Nap time!

It always seems like when you try to demo some software thing you're happy about, that's when you  start seeing failures you've never seen before.

Naturally I was showing some updates to some friends after work today, and that's when I find a game breaking bug. Whoopsie. Well this has never happened before, I swear!

Fortunately it was simple to track down/ fix. Basically I didn't want people to be able to use the menu stuff after crashing TOO soon before having a chance to see the ads. The problem was sometimes the ads fail, or just take SOOOO long that they don't fail in a reasonable time periods. Nobody is going to wait 20 seconds for a menu screen to show up, nor should they.

So I added a timeout to make the menu screen show up if you haven't gotten an ad or a failure from the ad-service within one second. I think that's a reasonable upper bound for someone to wait.

Also, I added so that when you tap on the main menu helicopter, it explodes! It was a stupid little gimmicky thing, but it was fun to add, and it makes me chuckle.

I did some menu work today, and some other odds and ends.

I knew I wanted to work on things, but I wasn't sure exactly where to start. I ended up adding the blue sky with clouds level background as the main screen and level select backgrounds. Maybe I'm over-using it, but I like it. Whatever, it looks better than a solid background color.

I spent a little time just playing the game to see if anything bothered me... I noticed that I could use the menu before the ads had loaded at all, so I put in a delay where the menu buttons don't show up until the ads have loaded, or failed to load.

It will be easy to configure this off if I add a disable adds IAP option.

I added one little check to avoid an integer overflow error. It will probably never happen, but I feel relieved adding that check in anyways.

Then I added the copter animation to the main screen. I think I'm going to make it blow up if you touch it, that would be kind of funny... but not tonight.

I was reading online and it turns out that I can submit this as an iPhone game and then make it a universal app (iPhone and iPad) later if I want. Honestly, I'm pretty burnt out on this game, I think I just want to finish it and put it behind me. I do want to get this so it looks good enough on older phones, as I've only been testing on my 5S. Crap, also on newer phones. At the very least I have to update my xcode and get this thing in the simulator for the new phones.

I should really review some of my older TODO lists, but right now I'm thinking about Game Center achievements, sound effects, and maybe a nice YOU WIN! screen when you beat all the levels.

I've probably been saying this for 2 months, but it doesn't seem like there's that much left.

Llama scarf.

So I added ad support, which wasn't too bad. I should give credit to the first blog post I found with steps on how to do it, which was quite useful, although some of his code was deprecated.

So I had to find replacement code for that stuff, but again, not too bad. They only show up when you crash, not when you beat a level, even though the gave over and level success screens are the same screen behind the scene.

I may add a wee tiny delay or a fade in to the menu options so that you get time to see the ad before trying again.

Mostly just polish and odds and ends from here on out.

It felt good to work on the game tonight. I had been doing a lot of holiday/family stuff lately and hadn't actually sat down to work on the game in a while.

w00t.

One of the less obvious ways of working on my game is just filling out forms that need to be filled out for the app store. 

I'm going to do ads, but I need to sign up for iAd. That meant... filling out forms.

Oh boy.

I'll probably actually start trying to use some of the iAd stuff next time I sit down to get some work done.

This will be the last time I work on the game in 2014. My arbitrary target date is Jan 15th. I suspect that the ipad will take longer to finish, but maybe I'll just go with the iPhone for the initial release if that seems to be the case.

I wasn't great about making time to work on the game during the holidays.

I made a simple icon tonight, to take the place of the default blank one that ios give you.

Just keeping it simple.

I'll keep this quick because it's getting late.

I added a new cave background, I think it looks good it has a bit of a blue hue to it.

I changed it so the level text switches to white when it's on a dark background (configurable).

I had some fun with the level display names.

I found a bug where the level text wasn't switching colors properly after completing a level and moving on to the next one, that was pretty easy to fix.

A couple of new background images and some new tiles. Trying to get a little more visual variety in the game.

The levels themselves are looking pretty decent.

I need to change the text color whenever there is a dark background, it's too hard to see for the dark background levels.

Yup yup.

So I was just playing my game, testing it out, you know. While I was waiting for some take-out food annnnd it crashed. Weird, it doesn't do that much. Tried again, and managed to crash it in the same way.

I noticed that the game would crash ONLY on levels that had 3 stars, and after you lost the level. I'm glad I ran into this one, because it was just a super stupid bug on my part, it was in a place I probably wouldn't have looked. I expected it to be some complicated viewcontroller thing, who knows. It was just a dumb logic mistake.

Then I made it so you could configure a background image and a foreground tile image. This means all of the graphics are now driven by a configuration file, which is awesome. I created a new tile for the tube levels, and I ended up using it in a few places.

I think simple and bright colored tiles work much better than detailed tiles. The tiles are too small and moving too quickly to be able to pick up any detail, it's better to just make them bright and simple.

If I get some time tomorrow, I think I'm just going to continue working on background images and some foreground colors that work nicely with them. Right now there's a little too much green in the foreground tiles. I need to mix it up.

I have to confess that I didn't do much work tonight. I just swapped out some image assets, but wow what a difference a background image makes!

I just hard-coded the resources to try out the new ones, I have to make them configurable from level data, but that's pretty easy.

So next up, make the graphics configurable, and maybe try to come up with a new background image or 2, then the play stuff should be... done!

At that point, it's really just odds and ends.