There was a bit of a hitch that came up Friday night after I had submitted to Apple. I went out with my wife and one of her friends for a drink after dinner. I was showing Dapple to my wife’s friend, and after 5 minutes of playing the 2 Player mode, he found a bug that no one had found before! Zounds!

Saturday morning I dug into the code (I know, I said I wasn’t going to work on the weekend, but that was assuming I didn’t find a bug like this). The bug looked minor: the mixing guide wasn’t rotating for player 2 (so it was rendering upside down from their point of view). However, as I dug into the bug I realised there was a bigger issue: player 2′s mixing guide was rendering for player 1′s current colour. This meant if player 2 started the 2 Player game and hit the mixing guide, a bunch of empty textures would render because player 1 didn’t have a colour yet. Yuck. The fix was pretty simple and localized (i.e. it was all inside one function in the code), so it was pretty low risk.

I ended up pulling my submission Saturday morning and re-uploading the build to Apple. I don’t think they review on the weekends, so I think it probably cost me a half-day off my submission. I haven’t found any more issues since, so the build should stand as it is now.

People keep asking me how long it will take before the game shows up in the App Store. The short answer is: I don’t know. The longer answer is: I don’t know, because there’s no set turn-around time. I’ve heard of some developers having apps approved in under 48 hours, but others who take over a week. Then, if the app gets rejected, I’ve heard it can take even longer to hear back. Apple will email me when the game is either accepted or rejected, so at least I don’t have to keep clicking ‘reload’ on the app store submission page.

This morning I sent out some emails to various iPhone review/news sites letting them know the game had been submitted, and telling them where to find the latest gameplay video I did last week. I figure it’s not likely any of them will write about it, but at least they’ll know they can expect another press release from me when the game launches…hopefully soon.

Speaking of the press release, I’m about to start working on that so that it’s ready to go out as soon as the game goes live. I also have to start working on my presentation for 360|iDev. I’ve got a rough idea of how I want to structure the talk, but now I need to start writing stuff down.

Owen

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm and is filed under iPhone, Marketing, Misc, 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.