Posted by
Jerrod Putman in
Games,
News & Announcements on February 23rd, 2010
An update for Word Monkey is now available in the App Store. This update has quite a few small changes, refinements and bug fixes.
Most specifically, we tweaked one of the gameplay rules. Before, you couldn’t spell the same word twice in a single game session. The monkey would simply scratch his head, and the letters would stay on the screen. We realized this was confusing to some players (“Did I not spell the word right?” or “Is that word not recognized by the game?”). Now, the letters will disappear, but you won’t get points for a word that has already been spelled during a session.
In addition, we’ve added the “Smartest Monkeys” leaderboard in OpenFeint, so now you can see how your monkey stacks up to others that are playing the game. If you feel you must, you can also “Reset” your monkey and start all over again, though that would be a very mean thing to do to your monkey.
We clarified some of the instructions in the Dr. Schmachter intros, fixed a few bugs, and even improved performance on first generation devices. So make sure you grab the update from iTunes or in the App Store on your device. And if you don’t have the game yet, you can grab it here.
Posted by
Jerrod Putman in
Games,
News & Announcements on February 18th, 2010
Word Monkey is now available in the App Store here! You can view more information about the game at the Word Monkey Game Page.
Posted by
Jerrod Putman in
Games,
News & Announcements on February 12th, 2010
It’s been a long time coming, but our new game Word Monkey for iPhone & iPod touch has been submitted to Apple and should be available soon!
In Word Monkey, your goal as Dr. Schmachter’s lab assistant is to use your device to train a cute little lab monkey by programming words directly into its brain! You have to quickly spell words from the rising jumble of letters before they hit the top of the screen, or it’s game over.
Head over to the Word Monkey game page to find out more information about the game. There you’ll find screenshots of the game, and we’ll be posting some video of the game over the next few days.
We’ll post again when the game has been approved and is up on the App Store!
Posted by
Jerrod Putman in
Development,
Technical on January 10th, 2010
UPDATE: There was a typo in the code section that adds the observer for NSUserDefaults. This has now been corrected. I also added information about how to find the proper assembly file when trying to access script class methods.
WARNING: The following is a technical article. Don’t blame me if you find it boring!
I love Unity! The Unity iPhone engine is a fantastic piece of technology, allowing us to quickly develop games without having to worry about a lot of the underlying stuff. However, Unity is essentially an additional layer on top of the iPhone SDK, which means that while the iPhone SDK may advance with new features, the Unity engine is generally a step behind with adding these features in a manner that can be easily accessed through script.
Enter Objective-C: This is the language that iPhone apps are usually written in. Unity provides some support for calling native Objective-C code from Unity script, but only for Advanced licensees and only in one direction. This can be pretty limiting especially if you’re trying to use a lot of the fancy features in iPhone OS 3.0. Sure, you can pass around information using the PlayerPrefs trick. But this has the problem of not being instantaneous, and it forces the app to constantly poll for new commands, which probably isn’t a good idea performance-wise.
What follows is a method for immediately calling Objective-C code from Unity script (for both Basic and Advanced licenses) and also vice versa! That’s right, two-way communication between Objective-C and Unity script that’s instantaneous.
