Trench Run 1.5.2 Released!

New Millennium Falcon Texture

Well, we’d had a  bug in 1.4 unfortunately that for many players caused the game to not load past the company logos ;(  The bad news is, it took a while to get the update out to Apple, but the good news is, we fixed a few other things while we were at it

1.  Black screen bug – fixed

2.  Added Calibration – hit pause, then “Calibrate” – you can now play at any normal angle you desire.  Now you don’t have to be Choir boy to play it.

Calibration Screen

3.  in-game sensitivity slider – people were unable to look in the settings panel for some reason, so we put the slider in both locations for your convenience

Sensitivity Controls

4.  Moved the “Difficulty” selection out of “settings” panel and now you have to select your difficulty when selecting your mission.  Again, people went out of their way to avoid looking at the settings panel, and thus, thought the game was 5 levels of EASY mode.  Yeah, I’d be pissed / disappointed too if that was all there was to the game.  To all you “reviewers” out there that said the game was 15 minutes long – try looking around next time and actual REVIEW the GAME before you “review” the game.  If anyone beats the game on Jedi in 15 minutes, their lying.  It takes 5 minutes to beat the Dog Fight level alone and that’s IF you can beat it.  Never mind the cannons section – they eat you alive.  Not to mention Darth is a menace and the exhaust port is nearly impossible to hit ( note i said nearly, it IS possible ).  So take off the dresses and put your manskirt on – play it on Jedi and get back to me.  If anything you’ll just be pissed off cause you see Yavin4 get toasted a million times

New Mission Selection Screen

5.  Increased the overall speed – it’s about 10% faster overall approx.

6.  switched to the classic texture for the Millennium Falcon easter egg

If you like what you see with 1.5.2, please take a moment to give us a rating or even a review on the AppStore.  The last bug really killed our ratings.  Our ratings are a perfect horseshoe – the people who got to play it, loved it.  The people that had the bug, hated it.  Understandably so.  Apparently, the VERY first time they played it, they got into the first arcade level, then inexplicably hit the “home” button on the device, thereby exiting the game during the game play ( no comment ).  This caused the black screen bug.

At last, this one issue has been fixed and finally released to the public along with the 2 most requested updates – calibration and sensitivity control in-game!

Merry Christmas to all you Star Wars fans!  I do hope you have fun beating the game on JEDI!!

Trench Run Featured on G4 Attack of the show!

Awesome review of the Trench Run:

http://g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/webtools/69233/Top-iPhone-Franchise-Games-Review.html

Trench Run v1.4 update now available!!

v1.4 for the Trench Run has FINALLY been approved by Apple ( still making its way around the planet ).  This version fixes a major memory issue experienced by 1st Gen iPhone and 3G iPhone users.   It also has a couple of other minor fixes as well.

The one nice thing about this fix is we were able to put the nice 3Gs version of the trench into all versions of the game now – so it looks beautiful no matter what you’re playing it on

3Gs Trench

We’d been able to hand out a few copies to people who bought the app on a 3G and 1st Gen iPhone and they all reported that the game worked perfectly on their devices with the update!

So if you gave us a bad review on the app store because of the game quiting, freezing, dying on you, would you PLEASE install the update and try again?  We would REALLY appreciate the help and a positive rating if you have the time.  Apple has taken their sweet time in approving this fix, and the ratings have killed us on this one issue.  VERY VERY FRUSTRATING!

Also, I think we’ve done everything we can possibly do to service the people who spent their hard earned money on this game – and we took it a step further this time

I had meant to hold on to this easter egg for a while, but since this bug cause such a problem for a many gamers out there, I’m letting this one out early to say “thank you” for your patience and time!

Easter egg:  Fly in the Millennium Falcon:

Millennium Falcon Cockpit view

Dog Fight View

Features:

*  Fly as Millennium Falcon

*  Insti-gib cannons – one shot kills/destroys.   You only get 4 blasts at a time, but one bolt destroys the object.

How do you get to it?!

click Play Now.  When you see the Death Star in the next screen, touch the Death Star’s cannon area (inset circle area when the big bad laser comes out).  Now play as the Millennium Falcon

OH and PS> if you’re a supposed iPhone app reviewer, please try the game in JEDI mode and adjust the sensitivity ( you know, because, it’d probably PLAY better ) – OH and don’t forget to try the ARCADE MODES which make game play infinitely longer…just a request

I couldn’t have said it better

The app store process is crazy. If you’ve developed iPhone apps and have submitted them for the store, you know exactly what I mean.

Even worse, if you’ve discovered a critical bug in your release, a fix can take 4-8 weeks AND can be rejected. Essentially, this flies in the face of what we’ve become accustomed to in the last 10+ years of software development and deployment.

I remember buying a Diamond Stealth card, only to install it and have my favorite game crash ( Descent 1 ). I read through a BBS that there was a fix if you called the company. I called, they sent me 2 disks in the mail. I remember praying that the disks would not be corrupted by the mail system xray machines or someone putting the mail bag next to a huge magnet. It took 2 weeks to get those disks.

Since then, we got this new thing called the “internet”, don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it makes getting fixes pushed out to the users an “instant” experience.  And as such, developers have adopted a “launch fast and iterate” development cycle that we’ve all become accustomed to.  If a game gets pushed out because of budget and some bugs are missed, we’re used to it.  We, as users, have adopted and accepted that a fix is coming.  In fact, we’re HAPPIER as users for not having to wait forever for the next version of a game or a new title.  Trust me, I’m happier

Case in point:  Duke Nukem3D.  Arguably one of the coolest games I ever loved.  I think if 3D realms had adopted this approach with the next version, we as fans might have actually been able to play and enjoy it.  As it is, I got sick of waiting, voiced my displeasure on the 3D Realms forums and never looked back.  I still have no idea if they ever released it after all these years.

Apple has essentially placed themselves in-between a developer and their users – even at the updates level.  So, as this article says – How would apple like it if they had a bug in OSX, but had to wait 4-8 weeks for approval by a 3rd party?

yeah, they’d be pissed off too.

Check out out:

http://paulgraham.com/apple.html

Try it on HARD or Jedi

We’re seeing comments from people who say Trench Run is too “easy” or “I finished it in 10 minutes”.

Please – go to settings, set it to something that’s a challenge like HARD or JEDI. THEN tell me it’s too easy. Trust me, it’s not, and it’s FAST.

If you beat it on Jedi, and still feel like it’s slow or too easy or you finished it too quickly, THEN i’ll take you seriously, but until then, RTFM – ever hear of settings? Use em’

PS> we’re still waiting on v1.1 to be approved by apple. I swear, if they charged a $500 fee to expedite a review of a release, I’d pay it. This 3-4 week wait time is completely unreasonable.

[/rant]… for now

Star Wars Trench Run – FIXED for 2G/3G iPhones

For those of you who bought Trench Run and ran it on a 3G device, you might have had some of the problems I listed in the last post.  Essentially, it was a memory issue.

We’ve been up late working on fixing the issue, and we finally found some white elephants in the app to kill off that brought the memory not only under 4omb’s (which is ideal for an iphone app) but we brought it down into the low 3o’s.

It now runs VERY well on a not only a 3G iPhone, but now works JUST as well on a 2G (1st gen) iPhone!!  I installed and played it on my 1st gen iPhone tonight and it was very smooth.

We’re testing internally tonight, and we’ve asked some of the people who purchased the app but entered negative reviews because of the 3G performance to help us test the app.  We were able to reach out to a few people who made the purchase to help us out and let them know – we’re not here to steal anyone’s money, we’re here to make a kick ass Star Wars game

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

And to make it up to all of you who will be waiting patiently for the 1.1 update in the app store, I’m going to reveal ONE of the easter egg ships (Darth Vader’s ship).

instructions>controls – touch where it says “toggle cockpit”  – play

I know that can’t make up for being frustrated initially, but hopefully, you guys will give it another chance and enjoy flying as Darth   The 1.1 update will be well worth the wait, I promise!

********* UPDATE  **********

This is feedback from one of the users on a 1st Gen iPhone (8gig) – he originally purchased and it was unplayable:

the difference is night and day. I made sure to NOT restart the phone and played with both music and sound enabled to get a sense of things. Not sure if there’s something specific you all are looking for, but barring that, here are my notes after 2 sessions totaling close to an hour of game play:

- opening video plays much smoother

- loading screens on the order of 5x faster (not scientific, but the difference is dramatic)

dogfight:
- very, very slight lag when tie fighters explode
- no lag during general flight or when firing and missing

trench levels:
- overall, very smooth
- controls more responsive, playback less jerky
- slight jerkiness returns when vader shows up (still very playable)
- videos when you fail/win are both smooth

- exiting to the home screen is cleaner (music doesn’t continue to play for several seconds anymore)

Star Wars Trench Run on 3G Devices

I’m posting this here just incase someone does a search on google for an answer

Many users with 3G devices have tried to play the Trench Run and have had the app crash or become un-responsive for them.  There are a couple of quick things you can do to fix it and get up and running:

1.  Reboot your device.  With all of the other apps and games you’ve had open before installing Trench Run, there’s not enough room.  A reboot will likely fix the issue.

2.  Turn off Music.  yeah, this sucks cause it’s the original score, BUT, at least you’ll be able to bag those baddies.

If you’re wondering why the Trench on the 3G looks different than the screenshots and videos you’ve seen, it’s because we created a special version with hardly any geometry and no lightmaps.  This helped performance on the 3G quite a bit.  The 2nd Gen iTouch and 3Gs phones enjoy shader and geometry that are not able to run on a 3G device.

We’re also putting in allot of effort to optimize performance on the 3G devices at the time of this post.  So rest assured, we’ll do our best to bring you the best experience we possibly can!

 

Star Wars Trench Run: Approved

We just got word that the Trench Run game was approved by Apple!

Click here to get it on iTunes

To celebrate, how about a few extra screenshots you haven’t seen yet?  Enjoy

Copy/Paste for Unity IDE

While at Unite2009, I had the opportunity to do 2 presentations on the Flash users day.  Both presentations went very well.  The response was great and the Unity people were fantastic – VERY genuine and completely cool people!

During one of my discussions, I was a little embarrassed to say I didn’t know how to retain properties that I was editing at runtime in the editor to objects I was rotating/moving etc.  I mentioned that there was likely some magic way of doing this, but I wasn’t aware of how, and that likely someone would show me after the talk.

Well, as it turns out Emil Johansen of the Unity team handed me an Editor script right after the talk was done!  The guy wrote it just as soon as I’d issued that statement in my talk, then proceeded to hand it to me while walking off the stage   EMIL – you get 4 rock on’s for that one!!

\m/ \m/ \m/ \m/

Get it here, love it there

And being a coder, he went on to perfect it and expand it for use with any component you might have in Unity.

And just to explain what it is I’m so happy about:  In Unity IDE, you can *run* your application and change the properties at runtime to debug/polish your settings.  But, there isn’t really a way built into Unity to say “save these settings”.  I wasn’t writing them down on paper though, I was taking snap shots with Jing and then typing them in

Emil’s Editor scripts extend the Unity IDE to add copy/paste options so you can easily run, set and save.  LOVE YOU EMIL!

Unite 2009 – Great Time!

I’m just about to leave San Francisco after have done 3 sessions over the past 2 days at Unite 2009. What an awesome event it was!

The people from Unity are unbelievably cool – every single one of them. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting them and the sessions were all excellent. I guess I’ve been to so many Flash conferences that this was a really nice change of pace.

The 3 Sessions I did went extremely well and the people that attended were awesome – we talked alot of star wars

I’ll post the Quicktime keynote exports when I get home, but these were the topics:

1. Flash3D to Unity3D – what’s the transition like?
2. Flashers doing the iPhone thing and why
3. Intro to Unity iPhone development: Case study on the Trench Run game

I’ll leave you with this slide from Session3