I’m prepared to officially declare Alpha this morning!

I had an extremely productive couple of days and finished off the 2 Player Mode last night. There are still a few small things to add to the game (a few animations to spice things up in places), but all the big features are finished. At this point it’s finishing up the last of the polish items and then it’s tuning, testing, and bug fixing until submission!

My original plan was to declare Alpha by the end of December, but then I decided I had time to implement Timed Mode and 2 Player Mode. I’m really glad I spent the time to add these modes; they add so much to the game. I really feel like I’ll be able to justify the price-point I’ve been mulling over in my head (more on that later). Given that I added two game modes in the last 3 weeks I’m feeling pretty good at declaring Alpha today.

The plan now is to wrap up the last of the polish tasks and fix the bugs I’m aware of by mid next week. At that point I’ll declare Beta and send out a Beta build to everyone who has signed up for Beta Testing.

I’m still looking for more Beta Testers. If you’re interested, please send me an email (info AT streamingcolour DOT com) with “beta test” in the subject. There are full details in this previous post.

Unrelated to Dapple, I wanted to share a few links that have been sent my way over the last while:

• AppTheater (www.apptheater.com) – A site that collects videos of iPhone Apps. If you want to see what an App is like before you buy it, look for a video here.
• Oolong Engine (www.oolongengine.com) – Noel from Snappy Touch informed me about this freely available simple engine for iPhone. It looks to me like it’s based off the code from Apple’s (now removed) CrashLanding example project, but they’ve added all kinds of handy functionality. I wish I’d known about this 6 months ago…

Oh, one final note: I contacted the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission, for those outside Toronto) about advertising on buses and subways. They sent me some pricing information and I’ve realised that the old adage “you need to spend money to make money” is so true. There should perhaps be a corollary “you need money to make money”. I’ve realised I can’t afford to do that kind of physical advertising until I make some money. Ironic, ain’t it?

Owen

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Design, iPhone, Marketing, Misc, Project Management, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.