Archive for the ‘Updates’ Category
Posted on July 15, 2009 - by Eric
The English Baron – Project Wordman update
Real Name: Montgomery Charleston Baron
Age: ??
Formerly an English professor at a prestigious university, Montgomery had a nervous breakdown in the middle of one of his class and had to retire early. Some say the reason was an anonymous student sent him a version of his favorite book, Moby Dick, translated in leetspeak. He moved back in with his grandmother, who shortly after his retirement passed away. He inherited the family mansion and has since then became more reclusive and eccentric.
Posted on July 11, 2009 - by Eric
Updates!
Its been a while since we have reported any news on RPL but this is what they call the calm before the storm. The only thing blocking the eventual storm is Apple and the laggard manner they take care of game developers.
- The developer account still has the wrong bank and tax info. For some reason, 2 weeks is not enough time for them to change a single entry in the database. fcktards.
- After 2 weeks, i sent a request to cancel the account so we can start anew. 1 week later, no answer. Apple really hates game developers,
- We will create a new individual developer account if this is not resolved next week.
- We are nearing release with only 1 week left for polish, integrating and beta testing.
- RPL is really shaping up nicely the extra 2 weeks of development time has done wonders to the usability and the performance.
- the microsite will be launched next week, the day when we submit the app to Apple. So 1-3 weeks before release. Hopefully 1 week.
- it done in Photoshop and is currently being CSSize by me. I am hoping to put some Coda style panels there but might be cut if it doesnt work right away.
- We hope to incorporate the Agon online update next week before submitting. Hope they release it early, Scoreloop just levelled up and they have the whole cross-promotion feature in it now. Very attractive.
- Pre-production on Project Slow is well under way.
Posted on July 2, 2009 - by Eric
Agon Online, I Choose you!
After comparing, evaluating features and then testing the sample games. We finally came to the conclusion that the best social platform overall is Agon-Online. Factors that convinced us are the following;
- Its neutral in terms of its appearance and functionality (compared to scoreloop which had the whole avatar / coins ecosystem which tended to steal mindshare when a player is using an app)
- Its cleanly designed (compared to geocade which looked rough and rudimentary)
- Its free (OpenFeint charges ‘pennies’ which is a fair offer, but once you factor in the fact that you will be paying crackers or pirates using your app. Then its not a viable thing anymore.)
- Its open and inviting (plus+ is a big wall, which we, iPhone developers should be very allergic by now)
- its pretty easy to integrate (more…)
Posted on July 1, 2009 - by Eric
Website updates
The Cavalcade Games website is a mishmash of flash, some SQL backend and wordpress. Needless to say its not cohesively designed. That will be remedied in the next couple of weeks as we have begun working on the final design modifying this theme from Woothemes.com and finally creating a games section where you can see our games, warts and all.
Some hair pulling was experienced when certain categories don’t get on the featured post (fixed by deleting the category and recreating it) and the big thumbnail feature not working. At first, I was really pissed at being denied access to the woothemes forum AFTER i bought their theme. Imagine buying a TV with no remote and the company asking for money for the priviledge of calling their support centers. Turns out their website had a bug where even if you have logged in from their main website, going to their forum, you have to log in again. After that was sorted out, Cavalcade games finally have auto thumbnails in the front page!
Some css edits went live yesterday to tighten things up. margins and padding were reduced, fonts sizes shrunk, etc. A couple of bug involving wptouch and Wp-super cache was found and duly squashed (turned super-cache off in the meantime.)
The game page for RPL will be our top priority, it has since been sportified and its all the better for it. Our ‘warm-up’ unity game is almost ready to go out and be ravaged by apathy, pirates or 1-star reviewers. Cannot wait!
Posted on May 21, 2009 - by Eric
RPL build 2
- two new backgrounds! grass and wood. Gotta have wood, everybody loves wood.
- background shake on non-draw matches.
- winning hands now poke to make things more physical.
- the new icon is now in and its looking pretty hot on the device!
- The text fits! 13 characters. phew!
- still lacking a few essential adjustment to make the whole thing come together.
Posted on May 12, 2009 - by Eric
Iphone Developer Program Enrollment pt. 3
im too anal to let my name appear
It was time to test our prototype on the iDevice through Unity Remote and Apple still hasn’t responded to the past issue with them asking the wrong business papers. After consulting with the awesome Touch Arcade forum community, we decided to just register as an individual with the knowledge that you can still choose a company name to headline the seller info (see image provided by the nice folks at App Tech Studios).
It didn’t sit well with me having my name there since I wanted Cavalcade Games to be the only brand associated with our fine content. So in the personal info form I entered ‘Cavalcade’ as my first name and ‘Games’ as my last name. With all the billing info based on my bank account and addresses. This way, Cavalcade Games will be the only name seen in app’s metadata. Pretty clever, yeah?
Well, the plan backfired. Turns out Apple does use the personal name for the contract and presumably it will be the name on the earnings check. Its just a minor inconvenience since we can either email apple for changes, continue to wait for APPLE’s email or change/create registered business name to Cavalcade Games (this is just a brand name for the company, where all game products go.)
I hope this experience will be helpful to any future developer that is as brand sensitive as me. Back to work for us, but now we are officially enrolled as Iphone developers and can test our prototypes on the device itself. And with the OS 3 mandatory requirement just went in effect, all is not a total waste.
Posted on May 7, 2009 - by Eric
Iphone Developer Program Enrollment pt. 2
We’ve got mail!
Mr. Mike Mata of Apple Developer Connection, Worldwide Developer Relations (what a mouthful) sent us the long fabled e-mail asking for business papers. He specifically asked for these;
-MAIN COMPANY CORPORATE TELEPHONE NUMBER (LANDLINE: NON TOLL-FREE)
- Articles of Partnership/Certificate of Partnership
- Certificate of Incorporation issued by Securities and Exchange Commission
The problem is Cavalcade Games is registered as a sole proprietorship business and not an incorporation/partnership. In our country, single owner business go through the Department of Trade and Industries, while multiple owners business go through Securities and Exchange Commission. Needless to say we can’t supply those documents since we only have the documents meant for sole proprietorship business.
I have already emailed them saying so yesterday and have yet to receive a reply. Fingers firmly crossed.
Posted on May 1, 2009 - by Eric
Iphone Developer Program Enrollment
The convuluted world of...
Enrollment is a word I thought I was finally rid of after college. But here we are, I have completed the first few steps in the Iphone Developer Program Enrollment Process. Hopefully it goes as smoothly as this guy’s company (4 days for initial email to arrive). But no worries, development is pushing ahead while waiting.
The steps laid out in this blog, is horrifically convoluted. Apple has since loosened up and I am sure more information are now available to help us through the process. Hopefully, next week, we can see some progress on the enrollment front.
Posted on April 28, 2009 - by Eric
Unity iPhone 1.0.2 Released!
It seems the stars are aligning. Just in time for our first foray into Unity Iphone development comes the newest update, fixing some major performance issues mostly related to audio.
Unity iPhone 1.0.2
Additional Features, improvements, and changes
New Features and Improvements
* Reduced memory footprint for uncompressed audio by 50%
* “Memory usage for textures reduced by 50%. Texture memory is now freed once it has been submitted to OpenGLES on the device. The “Enable Get/SetPixels” flag in the Texture Import Settings lets you disable this feature on a per texture basis in order to access the texture data from a script using GetPixel etc.
* Improved iPhone script call optimization
* Removed unused parts of Mono runtime
* Reduced memory overhead while reading data from disk and slightly improved load times.
* Support for several predefined splash-screens (portrait/landscape) for Indie version. Just rename one of the splash-screens in the output directory to Default.png
* Exported audio session activation/deactivation functions to AppController.mm
* Added Scripting Reference code examples for iPhone specific APIs
Bug Fixes
* Fixed audio to play correctly after phone call / text message / alarm interruption occurs
* Fixed compressed audio occasionally refusing to play
* Fixed AudioSource.PlayOneShot to work correctly with compressed audio
* Fixed audio to respect Mute switch and background iPod music
* Fixed Pause function and time property for compressed audio clips
* Fixed OpenAL memory leak
* Fixed PhysX memory leaks
* Fixed Audio and Animation assets leaking while loading new scene
* Fixed a crash related to playing compressed audio in a sequence
* Fixed memory leak while updating Mesh geometry data
* Fixed several small memory leaks in rendering module
* Fixed asynchronous .NET sockets
* Fixed .NET threads
* Fixed cross thread boundary calling to the delegates
* Fixed UnityEngine.TextEditor stripping
* Fixed GUI slider stripping
* Fixed GUI scroll view stripping
* Fixed IndexOutOfRange exception checking
* Fixed Boo.Lang.dll stripping
* Fixed occasional crashes of AOT cross compiler
Posted on April 27, 2009 - by Eric
Website and Twitter Level up!
We managed to work on the website the over the weekend. Here are the details of the changelist, for you people oblivious to the obvious 
- navigation system triggered by clicking on the logo
- a help prompt triggered by mysterious forces
- labels for the floating panels
- sign up for announcements
- an invisible flash contact form (its in the swf, its just for people with the 3rd eye)
- 10% to 20% faster for older machines
BLOG
- previous and next links in post (was a freaking pain to implement)
- poll on the right, please do vote since they will influence our upcoming products
- menu links sorted out (projects page still to come)
- feed now burned by feedburner
- I have installed a local duplicate of the site, and might start out on the final theme on my extra time
- new background!