I’ve got Word Up Dog now running with Game Center on iPads and iPhone 4+, but I need to test it on the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3+. So this is a call for testers – please sign up to join my Test Flight team if you’ve got any iOS device, and I may recruit you to help me test Word Up Dog, Rebuild, or some future game.
Word Up Dog was always meant to be an iOS game, so here we go!
Rebuild is now available for the iPad 2 on the Apple app store!
I am happy to report that the game plays great on the iPad 2. Sarah’s done a great job rethinking the interface for the touch screen and this is probably the best version of the game. You can almost feel the zombies clinging to your finger tips.
Sarah also made some new content for the iPad 2 version. She didn’t really have time to stuff all the features into Rebuild 2 that she wanted to so this was a chance to get that stuff into the game. You could think of the iPad 2 version as the “complete” version of Rebuild 2.
I don’t want to spoil all the new stuff but there is a new plotline (which I wrote, props to me!) with a new building and a new ending. The new plot is unique because it’s more of a selfish path through the zombie apocalypse.
There are also Watch Towers that you can use to keep tabs on the zombie hordes. If you research things right you can even use them to mow down troublesome clumps of zed (a great way for advanced players to keep the danger rating down).
As with Rebuild and Rebuild 2, Rebuild iPad was written entirely while traveling. While Rebuild was mostly written in europe Rebuild 2 was written in Central America. Rebuild iPad was written in Japan and the Philippines!
It was great fun to test. I’ve played hours and hours of Rebuild and Rebuild 2 but the iPad game really revitaised the fun for me.
I hope you find playing it as great an adenture as making it was!
AIR 3.0 is definitely faster than 2.6, but I still ran into some major performance issues when adapting Rebuild 2 for iPad. It came down to dragging the big map around. In its original vector form, the map moved slowly and chunkily as all the buildings were rendered at every frame. As one gigantic bitmap it was quick as can be, but a 2000×2000 bitmap takes up far too much ram. I found an optimum middle ground but including the bulky AIR interpreter I regularly need up to 100mb, and the iPad 1 only has 256mb ram in total. So, what I’m saying is… Rebuild 2 is coming to iPad 2 and only 2. Sorry early adopters, you should have waited a year for the iPad with twice the ram and faster cpu & gpu. And a camera.
I also had to work around a shocking number of bugs in AIR 3.0 Mobile. Mostly display issues that could be solved by converting things into bitmaps before displaying them, each time increasing the amount of ram the game needs. Then, I was pretty sad I couldn’t add Game Center support without fiddling with Native Extensions in Xcode. I’m looking to pay someone to do this, because of course I’m The Girl Who Wrote An IPad Game Without A Mac.
Almost. Apple removed their web-based system for uploading binaries around the same time 3rd party compilers made it possible to build from Windows or Linux. Now, you can only upload using Apple software running in Mac OS. Sigh.
Fun Rebuild fact: in the programming code, survivors are called “Colins”.