Philippines & Hong Kong

Kiss
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

After Tokyo we spent two months in the Philippines with our friends Ron and Arlie, and my god did we have a blast. We stayed in a seaside mansion where we had delicious Filipino food prepared for us nightly, and were visited by friends from across the indie–verse and beyond. We took a lot of pictures, and it seems most of them fit into the categories: sailing, snorkeling… and bugs.

Oh and some photos of me shooting an AK-47 and hiking up to a native Mangyan village with our friend Peter. The expats were super friendly and welcoming, centered around the local yacht club where we had dinner on Friday nights and took a few sailing lessons. The older brits and their young Filipino wives seemed a little colonial at times, but some like Peter were active in the community and helping to promote touristic alternatives to seedy Sabang and boring White Beach.

After the Philippines the two of us spent two weeks in Hong Kong. Unfortunately Colin came down with a mysterious illness and was out of commission for much of it. We stayed in Mong Kok on the Chinese side which has the highest population density in the world, as well as many wonderful markets and whole streets dedicated to aquariums, flowers, and songbirds. Our room was a cozy little breadbasket, bright and quiet and just big enough for a bed and the two of us to stand. We met some eccentric housemates and wrote an iPad game for Colin’s mum, which teaches Japanese Katakana using a crossword and photos from our time in Tokyo. We showed it around at an indie game meetup in Hong Kong and people were impressed, so we may release it on the app store eventually.

Christmas with family on Vancouver Island was great as always. It hasn’t snowed yet but there’s still time before we head down to San Francisco. We’ll be there until March or April but haven’t decided where to go after that. Europe? Eastern Canada? We’ll see…

Rebuild: iPad 1 + 2 sales figures

Rebuild for iPad reached the US top ten in Simulation & Strategy.
After all sorts of whining about Flash’s poor performance on the iPad 1, I manned up and made it happen.

The iPad 1 version of Rebuild has less snantzy animations, the map doesn’t scroll quite as smoothly, and admittedly it does run out of ram sometimes and crash. But these issues don’t seem to have lowered the game’s ranking or sales. I’ve gotten more complaints about Air incorrectly listing 15 languages than about performance.

I’ve been tracking the figures on AppFigures.com and was excited to see Rebuild’s #1 app ranking in Anguilla. Well… just kidding, but it was in the top 100 games in the US and UK for awhile. Considering it was never featured by Apple, Rebuild did pretty well, and made $15k in the first month.

Rebuild for iPad now has Game Center Achievements & Highscores
Rebuild for iPad now has Game Center Achievements & Highscores.
It’s evident that Rebuild’s success on the iPad came from it’s previous success as a Flash game. The sales peaks came on days when Rebuild was reviewed on sites like TouchArcade, as well as AppTudes, AppSmile, iPaddisti, 148Apps.

Releasing iPad 2 then iPad 1 separately may have been better too, because the update triggered a second round of press.


Rebuild sales peaked during reviews and updates
Rebuild sales peaked during reviews and updates.
Likely it will earn another $15k from now on, possibly more if I put out an iPhone version or a content update and do some creative sales to get more press. But of course I’d rather be working on new things.

Like the Katakana crossword game Colin and I wrote for his mum for Xmas. Or the movie keywords parlor game I’ve been meaning to write for years. Or Word Up Dog (perhaps soon to be rewritten in Stage 3D).

Or, you know, Rebuild 3.

Word Up Dog: Game Center with AS3

Word Up Dog Leaderboard
This bizness be fresh. Take you from some disconnected punk to BAM! - competin' with all yo homeboys, earnin' achievements and shit.
In my last post I lamented not having access native iOS features such Game Center and single sign-on Twitter. Well, Milkman Games has come to the rescue with their Game Center Native Extension for Adobe AIR. Took me less than an hour to pop it in to my FlashDevelop project, connect all the events and go. All in AS3, no Mac or Xcode required. Post scores, view achievements, all that good stuff with minimal effort. They also have an Android AdMob extension and more on the way – valuable tools for running AIR on mobile devices.

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 Sand Level
Sandworms, vines, thievin rabbits. Dawg this hood gonna get isself a makeover.
For anyone who played the old flash version of Word Up Dog, there’s going to be some changes. I’m spicing up the levels with some new terrain and new powerups. I know, it’s no Rebuild, but after writing about zombies for four months I need some cute animals talking in urban slang stereotypes.

Word Up Dog was always meant to be an iOS game, so here we go!

Rebuild iPad is out!
Rebuild for iPad 2
Rebuild iPad was born in the jungle

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.

Rebuild for the iPad 2!
Rebuild for the iPad 2 is out!

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!

Rebuild 2: Coming to iPad 2

Rebuild for iPad 2
I wrote most of Rebuild for iPad in the Philippines
I wrote about AIR for iOS earlier in the year, but got caught up with Rebuild 2 before I could actually release any iOS game. By the time I got back to it, Adobe had just released AIR 3.0, and FlashDevelop 4.0 now comes with an AIR Mobile AS3 project that makes building Flash games to run on iPhone/iPad and Android a snap.

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.

New Buildings in Rebuild iPhone
What are those new buildings there?
But enough with the technical. Although the iPad version is a port of Rebuild 2 Flash, I added some new content to the game as a thank you for fans of Rebuild 2 who buy it. There are two new buildings, and one is linked to a new branch of tech. Some fresh events spattered about, and an entirely new story arc and ending written by my husband Colin. You can discover it for yourself (assuming you have an iPad 2) later this month.



Fun Rebuild fact: in the programming code, survivors are called “Colins”.