Some of you noticed how Black Shades iPhone recently disappeared from the App Store. This was due to our recent switch from David's private iPhone developer account over to Wolfire's company account. We thought the switch would be instantaneous but four confusing days later, you can grab BSi on the App Store again. You can still catch it at 99 cents but you should hurry because we plan to raise the price soon.

It's no secret that Wolfire's long history of making Mac games stems from the fact that we are big believers in Apple and really appreciate the care and attention they put into most of their products and services. However, when it comes to interacting with the iPhone App Store via iTunes Connect things are surprisingly disorganized.

The biggest problem stems from the fact that the iTunes Connect UI is not all that intuitive and there doesn't seem to be any real instruction for setting up or modifying your account. To help you out, Apple lists a phone number and various generic emails you can contact for support. Unfortunately, the phone operators don't seem to be able to access your account, check your status or provide instruction on what you need to do to finalize an application. Instead they usually direct you to one of the generic email addresses.

Then it usually takes at least a day to get an email response (bad news if you have a live app waiting) and any given responder can only help you with the small chunks of the process directly related to his department. Other times you just won't get a response.

Additionally, the iTunes UI is designed to provide you with friendly green check marks that are quick to report that you're all done with the process on your end when there may actually be bonus hidden steps further down the road. With no one there to guide you and say "Hey, here's what we're waiting on." it seems dangerously easy to get lost in purgatory.

The moral of the story: Set up your account before your app goes live. Unfortunately, we never had this luxury because a release date glitch made BSi think that it was supposed to launch on February 13th. It was February 26th when BSi cleared inspection from Apple, and the app not only fired without warning but also seems to have had no chance of landing on the "What's New" section of the App Store because on launch day it was already considered to be two weeks old.

One final grievance involves promo codes. If you want to get exposure to iPhone users, it's a good idea to ask reviewers to look at your app. Standard etiquette suggests you should offer a promo code to reviewers so that they can download your app for free. Apps can be sold internationally and we have some good friends at Games4Mac.de who wanted to review BSi. To our dismay we found out that they have German iTunes accounts and we can only generate promo codes for U.S. accounts. Why dost Apple mock us so? Shouldn't they be encouraging us to promote our apps?

It was surprising to see that Apple has trouble living up to its usual high standards with respect to services for iPhone developers. Perhaps if Apple maintained some live chat support, and listened to user feedback they could eliminate some of these inefficiencies :). That's enough ranting from me. The important thing is that BSi is no longer stuck in "no man's land" and we've survived a crash course education on launching iPhone apps that should make us pretty savvy for any future projects.

Are there any other iPhone developers who have had fun experiences with the App Store? How do you guys feel about the App Store from the consumer perspective?

This is the last blog in the series talking about the dog weapons I made a couple weeks ago. Here is the final weapon in that set.

A massive war hammer

This two-handed war hammer is unwieldy, but can cause catastrophic damage to even the most heavily armored opponents. This is the first clan specific weapon I have made for the dogs. Even though it may not be the most practical weapon, it is very commonly used by commanders of one of the dog clans because it is important to their clan identity.

All the dog weapons made... so far

Here you can see the respective sizes for the dog weapons. These are all from around 200 to 350 triangles. Thanks for the feedback! I have actually made changes to some of the weapons since the last time I posted them in the blog. Even when I didn't change them, I ended up doing more research which may make its way into the next set of weapons :)

I started working on the sound effects for Overgrowth, and decided to start with the sound of air rushing past as the camera moves around the scene. Here's a short video of our wind sounds so far! Please feel free to watch it in HD.

This is a good test for our sound system because it requires looping sounds with dynamic volume and pitch-shifting. There's a constant looping wind sound for the scene, overlaid by another wind sound that increases in pitch and volume as the camera speeds up. I also added a subtle camera shake effect at higher speeds. I also tried a blur effect and field-of-view shift, but decided they were too distracting.

These details probably seem insignificant, but I find that these effects make it fun even to move the camera around! This is a good, though small, example of my basic game design philosophy: make all of the player actions rewarding at a low level (a.k.a. making them 'juicy'). The real challenge for me on this project will be to support that with solid higher level mechanics as well.

Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week...

If you are confused, please read our fancy FAQ.

Aubrey has made a bunch of new art. Next week I think I will do an art dump and include a bunch of new stuff from Aubrey in the alpha as we have accumulated quite a bit of stuff to show you guys.

On the code front, most of our time is spent working towards combat, which requires the animation editor. In addition to that, here are a few highlights from SVN:

- Rabbot can now perform a Rabbot push and attack another Rabbot.
- Autosave for the map editor
- A number of bug fixes

I was really excited to tell you guys about sound and a few sound related features we have added, but there was a last minute bug so it's not in this week's alpha. Stay tuned for a blog post about it later though, it is pretty sweet.

Be sure to check out the new maps in the secret preorder forum. It is probably a good idea to vote yes in Nimai's poll.

Thanks as always for all the support! See you guys in IRC and the forums.

Because of all the exciting Overgrowth modding that's going on right now we wanted to go beyond the map editor tutorial video and editor controls post to clarify the difference between groups and selections. While groups and selections have the same behavior with respect to translations, they are distinct when it comes to scaling and rotations.

Here's the rule: Scaling and rotating a selection of objects yields transformations relative to the position of each individual object whereas scaling and rotating a group causes transformations that are all relative to the position of the group. Sound confusing? Yeah sorry about that. Here's a video that will hopefully make things clearer. Please feel free to watch it in HD.

Press the triangle button for captions (download transcript)

What do you guys think about this functionality? Do you think it makes sense to have selections and groups behave differently or would you prefer that selections were identical to groups?