Elerium 115 - Game under development

Toby

Working on my 1st game using the GameSalad Engine - Elerium 115.

GameSalad..... awesome development app. I can actually build games for the iphone with this thing. The Apple iPhone SDK is just spooky black magic to me. You would think a company like Apple who prides itself on usability and ease of use would make something like GameSalad really! Great tool guys.

I'll post a teaser in the next few hours / days as the project develops.

If you are wondering about the title, Elerium 115 is an undiscovered, very heavy alien periodic table element.

True story, they just have not managed to find/make it yet but they know it's there.

Toby

Toby

Seems it's rather difficult to publish anything, as the server is not responding to any upload requests..... endlessly contacting server!

Erghhhh.....

Toby

The Teaser.... It's up, I guess it was always up. Gamesalad just never appeared to complete the upload process.

http://gamesalad.com/game/play/8225

Please let me know what you think, even if it's just the intro teaser, there is more to this game I promise.

Toby

SDMG

Looks very promising! ... unfortunatly it took very very long to load...

Let's play the first level )

Toby

Yes the load time was due to the working layered PNGs in the working directory. When it's ready I'll flatten the images which should reduce the size considerably. Probably should have done that first really..... next time.

Toby

Thought it would never happen but Elerium 115 has now entered the app store... finally after many phonecalls and fixes requested by Apple.

This is a (arm7) iPhone 3GS / newest iPod Touch / (A8) iPad game only, sorry 3G owners... it would just not run fast enough to play on the arm6 processor.

Proud to announce the game is here: Finally!
http://itunes.apple.com/app/elerium115/id358716680?mt=8

Promo codes to follow shortly!

adado

Looks awesome. How did you get it to have a 3GS only requirement? Did you say it required a compass enabled device or something?

Toby

Yes, I first tried specifying a 'armv7' in the device capabilities key but after many discussions with the iPhone app support team I had to change this to magnetic compass and make a few tweaks in the project file - they were not going to accept armv7!

No matter, after many weeks of waiting (Months actually) it's up!

adado

Could you share what you did to restrict to the "compass"? My app is in the same boat and I would greatly appreciate it. I believe it is an entry in the app's main plist file but I figure having input from someone who actually did it would be a sure fire way to make sure my ducks are in a row. I know a few others here are in the same boat and you'd be a hero! ;-)

Toby

Yes you need to modify the info.plist file which contains all the attributes required by the app.

Need to insert the required 'UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities' and 'key' in the info.plist file.

I ended up choosing 'magnetometer' as my key.

I had to get the help of the guys at Gendai to give me the ability to modify this key by providing an xcode project file that i could build from within Xcode instead of uploading the file to Gamesalad servers.

I tried modifying the info.plist file within the compiled binary app from Gamesalad servers but this just resulted in a check / error at upload to Apple.

You will need to talk to the support guys at Gendai...if you have a pro account! if not..... you might be stuck.

I imagine Gendai will build a targeting feature within GS in the future to cater for iPad (A8) 3GS (A7) and 3G (A6) specific builds.

adado

Thanks Toby. I appreciate it.

And devs...hint, hint, hint from Toby's post above! :-)

firemaplegames

The new publish settings has a ARM7 checkbox.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but I think both of your games (elerium 115 and Star Keep) would do much better on the iPod Touch 2nd Generation. More kids have iPods, since there's no monthly phone contract, and they say that most game sales actually come from iPod users, not iPhone.

By targeting the magnetometer (compass) in the 3GS, you are blocking ALL iPod Touch users from getting your games, as well as every iPhone except the 3GS, since only the 3GS iPhone has a compass.

I realize this was what was finally necessary to get it approved, it is just a shame.

In the future, hopefully this will be less of an issue as the processors keep getting better.