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.

We had put together a few quick levels, and while the general idea was fun enough, I found myself unable to come up with interesting level designs. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just not that into level design. I like creating game mechanics, but I don’t necessarily like coming up with interesting variations on them. I guess that’s why I became a programmer and not a designer.

So is the game canned?

No. I’m going to let it stew in my brain for a bit, and possibly get some outside help from some industry friends who actually like doing level design. The gameplay itself may even change drastically over the course of development. But hey, that’s what indie development is all about! If something just isn’t working, unlike at a big giant quadruple-A game maker, there’s room for experimentation and course correction. It’s no fun working on a game you just don’t fully believe in, so you might as well put the brakes on now before you’ve put so much time into the project that you can’t go back.

Visualizing The End

There’s another project I announced here on the site called Visualize, which was a visual logic editor for the Unity engine. While I had a large portion of the work finished for the plugin, I was mostly waiting for feedback from the Unity developers on a few features. They essentially came back with a “we don’t support that particular interpretation of our documentation”, and so a big feature I wanted to implement would not make its way into the plugin. Eventually, enough time passed that someone else did what I was trying to do, and managed to do a much more complete product than I had planned on doing.

So if you were looking forward to Visualize, I suggest you instead go download PlayMaker from Hutong Games from the Unity Asset Store. We’re now using it in our projects, which means that Visualize is essentially dead. I’m not complaining though; I didn’t really want to get into the tools business. We needed a visual logic editor for our games, and none existed at the time. Now one does.

More To Come

So even those Safety First is on the backburner and Visualize has been put out to pasture, we’ve still got other things brewing:

1. Word Monkey update: This one has been a long time coming, and it’ll still be a little while before it’s ready to submit to Apple, but it’ll be worth it! Retina display support, bug fixes, and Game Center support (leaderboards, achievements, and oh online multiplayer). No estimated time frame for that other than “soon”.
2. There’s a top secret project that we’ve been working on since the middle of last year. It’s been going very, very slowly, but it’s also our most ambitious project. It has the potential to be very, very big… but I can’t talk about that one, unfortunately. No time frame on that one either.
3. There’s also one other game we’ve been developing, and that’s one I do want to start talking about going forward. We started this one late last year and then I got derailed writing Visualize. Now that PlayMaker is out and I’ve found time to sit back down with the project, some pretty cool things are starting to happen with it. My next post will introduce you to the game and will kick off my (hopefully) regular posts about the development of the game.

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!

Word Monkey is coming to iPad courtesy of a new update that has just been submitted to Apple!

The new update makes Word Monkey a universal app that will run on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Essentially, if you already have Word Monkey for your iPhone or iPod touch, you get the iPad version for free!

Here are some new features coming with the update:

• Play Word Monkey on the beautiful iPad screen with hi-res graphics.
• Compete against a friend with the new split-screen multiplayer mode that’s only available for iPad.
• Don’t have any good letters? Use two fingers to scroll the blocks upwards to get new letters quickly.

Note that with the new iPad support, devices running OS 2.x will no longer be supported. You can upgrade your device to a newer version from iTunes.

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.