The other project I wanted to pursue was updating our existing games. It’s been a long time since we’ve pushed out any updates, and our games seriously needed them. As you may have seen from our news section, we managed to release an updated version of Sheepstacker. I’m going to go into a bit of what changed and what we had to do to get this update out the door.

Embracing UIKit

For both Sheepstacker and Word Monkey, we used a custom-built UI solution that used Unity’s built-in GUITexture and GUIText types. While I had gotten very good at manipulating it, it was still a pain to work with and not at all flexible. For version 1.4 of Sheepstacker, I decided to do something crazy and completely rewrite the UI (all of it) completely in UIKit.

The first step in this process was downloading and importing Prime31‘s excellent NativeToolkit plugin, which provided a simple interface for showing UIKit view controllers whenever necessary. I had to make some modifications to the Objective-C code, however, as I wanted to have a static background view that would stick around through navigation transitions (i.e., a “paused” image and dark background are always visible while the user is paused, even if he goes to the options screen).

Creating the screens in UIKit was a breeze, because I was able to use Interface Builder to lay everything out. Retina display support was handled automatically (I just had to supply an @2x version of each image). And the iPad UI was dead simple to implement as well, as I simply created separate XIBs and used the same classes to power them.

On the whole, I enjoyed the process, but it too much longer than I had anticipated it would. This mostly had to do with the fact that we already had a fully functional game set up in a particular way that was now having all of its UI rewritten. In fact, all of the old UI was removed. The only thing that remains is in the in-game HUD, as it would have been too much of a performance hit to have that handled in UIKit (would have to send the game state to native code each frame, which is a bit expensive to do).

Game Center and the End of AGON

Game Center was implemented through the use of another Prime31 plugin. For the most part, this process was straightforward, with the exception of having to serialize scores and achievements when there’s a network error.

My favorite new feature in the update is the display of your friends’ high scores when you finish a game. I saw this feature implemented in Retro Dreamer’s excellent Velocispider and though to myself, “This needs to be in Sheepstacker!” It really motivates you to keep playing the game when you see that your friend has a higher score than you, instead of some random username.

Another reason for pushing out this update now is that the AGON Online leaderboards and achievements platform is scheduled to shutdown on June 30th. While the AGON team gave us plenty of time to do something about this, what they didn’t provide was an updated library that worked with the latest version of Unity and Xcode. Unfortunately, this meant that we were unable to save any of our users scores or unlocked achievements.

While I’m personally deeply regretful about this, the fact is that we actually did make a few significant gameplay changes that might have made resetting the leaderboards a necessity anyways.

Gameplay Tweaks

The fact that the sheep spew forth nickels when you combo stack is really just a joke between my wife and myself. I asked what should spew out when a combo started (thinking of sparkles or something), and my wife said plainly, “Nickels.” And that was the end of that.

What I didn’t do a good job of was incorporating the nickels into the actual gameplay. The nickels were originally supposed to be another score type, as it was more indicative of how well you stacked instead of how high you stacked. However, most players were simply confused by their presence and referred to their stack height as their score. Even I did this.

In the new version, I wanted to make the nickels actually important to gameplay. We’d had this odd game rule where the user would get an extra heart every 50 sheep stacked (plus one at 25). In 1.4, that rule has been removed and extra hearts are now earned with every 250 nickels. This means that a player’s stack quality directly affects how high he can stack, because the better his stack, the more nickels he has, which means more hearts, which means more chances to keep stacking. I’m a bit irritated that I didn’t come up with the idea two years ago when we first released the game as it seems so obvious now. Nickels also add extra time to Speed Stack, again directly affecting gameplay.

The other tweak we made was reducing the maximum heart count from four to three. We had three hearts initially when we were developing the game, but felt that the game was too hard for newer players. After seeing more players play the game, I came to realize that the extra heart didn’t actually help that much. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect as players wouldn’t play as carefully as they did when there were only three hearts. The change just “feels” right. That’s really all there is to it.

Now What?

So Sheepstacker 1.4 is out, and I hope everyone is enjoying it. Unless necessary, the game probably won’t see another update until iOS 5 releases later this year (as we want to update the game to take advantage of some of the new Game Center features).

But what’s next? Back to Sol Defender? Not quite yet. We have an opportunity to be on the leading edge of iOS gaming. It’s an interesting opportunity, and it may not pan out, but we’ve got to try it. After we’re finished with that, I’ll be returning to Sol Defender, as it’s a game I’ve been wanting to make since the App Store launched.

Here’s what you can expect from this massive update:

• Game Center leaderboards and achievements
• Retina display graphics
• iPad support (Universal)
• Revamped UI
• Better performance (60 fps on most devices)
• Gameplay tweaks (extra hearts and time in Speed Stack are now awarded for every 250 nickels)

There is one caveat to all of the great new features: the AGON Online service is shutting down on June 30th, so we’ve removed it from this version. Unfortunately, we were unable to salvage the scores and achievements from AGON due to library incompatibilities with Unity (and believe me, we tried).

However, since we’ve made some fairly significant gameplay changes, the old scores and achievements wouldn’t be representative of the current state of the game. We apologize for the inconvenience of this and hope you can understand that we were simply out of options. We’ve begun caching this information on our own for future versions in case this situation ever happens again.

A new version of Sheepstacker Lite will be coming shortly as well. It won’t have Game Center support, but the other changes will be coming along for the ride.

We’re pleased to announce that Sheepstacker version 1.4 is almost ready to be shipped off to Apple, but we need your help! While we have a very stable version of the game running, we want to take extra care to make sure this is the best version of Sheepstacker yet. So we’re asking you to sign up to become a Tiny Tim Games beta tester!

We use a service called TestFlight to distribute our beta builds and to gather information from our beta testers. To sign up for beta testing, just follow this link:

http://bit.ly/mHSTxv

We’ll be handing out promo codes for Sheepstacker to the lucky ones who make it into the beta test to give to a friend (or to use yourself, if by some chance you haven’t played the game yet). We can’t accept everyone into the beta, so don’t fret if you don’t make it in. We’ll have plenty of beta opportunities in the future.

As part of this “thank you”, we’d like to announce that not only have Sheepstacker and Sheepstacker Lite been updated for iOS 4, but we’ve also given a NEW LOW PRICE to Sheepstacker! If you haven’t tried the game yet, now’s a great time to pick it up. You can buy it from the App Store or try out the lite version first.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue caused our players. As always, our support link is available if you find you are having problems with one of our games. We will always give our best efforts to resolve any issues you may have with our games.

In addition to the Word Monkey update, Sheepstacker also received an update. The update fixes the freeze that would occur on iPod touches when trying to access the Options menu, as well as a bug that would occur only on first run of the game. Be sure to grab this update, which should be available now.

UPDATE: We’ve been notified of a problem where new high scores are not recorded or uploaded to the high score server. We have fixed the issue and have already submitted the fix to Apple. We apologize profusely for the inconvenience this has caused our users!

As always this update is free to you if you’ve already purchased the game. If not, you can always grab the game from the App Store here.

We’re pleased to relay that Sheepstacker has been featured in the App Store’s Games “What’s Hot” section! Screenshots or it didn’t happen:

Thanks to our good friends over at Retro Dreamer for pointing it out to us!

In addition, we’re now sitting at #99 in the Games->Puzzle Top Paid Apps list. Welcome to all the new stackers!