Tag: Rebuild

  • Rebuild: Sales abound as winter’s come early

    Rebuild mobile’s on sale for 99 cents as part of the indie #superstrategysale. If you’re looking for real mobile strategy games, now’s the time to get Rebuild, Hunters, Call of Cthulhu, and Tactical Soldier – Undead Rising for a fraction of their usual prices.

    Rebuild’s been on sale quite a bit lately. October marked the one-year anniversary of Rebuild 2 (Oct 6th to be exact, with the mobile version on Nov 17th). To celebrate I did my first big content update for Rebuild, and ran a 99 cent sale for most of the month. The main new addition was seasons – now you could start the game in winter and play with an extra challenge: farms produce no food (no, not even winter melons!).

    Of course, although it’s possible to get through by just tightening your belts and doing daily scavenging trips to food-marts, that wouldn’t be as exciting as, say, eating human flesh. For example. So I made that an option: if it comes down to it you can eat your fallen comrades. Of course, once you try the other-other white meat it’s hard to be satisfied with anything else, and cannibalism has a tendency to escalate to much darker places. You’ve been warned!

    Another advantage to this winter mode is that it comes up naturally if you start a fort in spring and make it to day 200 or so, well past the point that the game gives you interesting content. So you can now try to save up enough food to feed your 100-person fort until spring (hint: you’ll need 100 * 30 * 3 = 900 day’s rations). Or, you know, just see what happens. Winter might be a good time to get in that helicopter and get the hell outta Dodge.

    The October sale and new content afforded Rebuild a round of press mentions and a New & Noteworthy feature on iTunes. It surprisingly didn’t make it into any Halloween-themed features which was what I was aiming for with my brazen new pumpkin icon. Downloads slowly petered off after the initial spike, and the curve didn’t seem to change when I put the price back from $0.99 to $2.99. In all the event doubled my expected profit for October. Probably it was worth the trouble, although the iPhone5 release and some Google Play bugs made it far more stressful and time consuming than it should have been. Not to mention that month I had to finish Incredipede with Colin!

    By happenstance Rebuild also got rolled into Google Play’s 25 cent sale in September which was rather interesting (55k downloads in one day whaaaow). It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on my iOS sales, but Android sales appeared to triple because of it. It was interesting to see them try such a daring “Steam sale”, but I hope to hell players don’t get used to it and start waiting for 99 cent apps to “go on sale”.

  • Rebuild’s on sale. Why? #BecauseWeMay

    Rebuild 99 cent saleThis weekend I and a host of other indie developers put our games on sale #BecauseWeMay. Last week Amazon had the same idea and put Rebuild on sale for 99 cents, and although I’m personally fine with whatever they do and it did make me money, I didn’t have the option to say no. Other platforms do the opposite: they set a price in stone and don’t let developers put their own games on sale. So #BecauseWeMay is an acknowledgement of those platforms (like the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Steam) that let developers choose their own prices. Super Office Stress took the message to heart and actually raised their price to 99 bucks.

    In other Rebuild news, I’ve done a few more interviews recently, and wrote a postmortem where I describe the ups and downs of writing Flash games. All this keeps getting me thinking about a sequel…

    But mostly I’ve been beavering away with Colin at Incredipede. I hope he’ll want to post something soon because it’s looking great!

    EDIT: Amazon’s decided to feature/discount Rebuild again this weekend, so you can go get Rebuild for your Kindle Fire. How much will it cost? Only Amazon knows!

  • Rebuild now available for Android phones & tablets

    Yes, you can now get Rebuild for your Droid Nexus Galaxy Razr Epic Maxx, or whatever you call that thing! But first, an update:

    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild’s doing way better than expected on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This week it’s featured and in their top paid games – up there with three versions of Angry Birds (or is it 4 now?). It’s gotten mentions on crackberry.com, blackberrycool.com, and playbookdaily.com.

    All of this is so awesome, because the port took zero effort… and I’m rather fond of my new PlayBook.

    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    But even with all this extravaganza, my sales there are just barely matching the current iPad/iPhone sales (where Rebuild is #500 in games, #50 in strategy with a super-minor feature in iTunes – bet you can’t find it). So being a relative nobody on iOS == stardom on the PlayBook? Bummer for RiM, but I’m just so happy to be loved that I’d rather not dwell on that.

    Up next: the terrifying Android marketplace. I’d been avoiding Android because of my instinctive fear of all those different devices. Despite all my laboring over the iOS version, Rebuild is still a little sluggish and crashy on the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. There are much less powerful Android phones out there and no easy way to target only the ones with enough RAM and CPU/GPU power to run Rebuild smoothly (although I’ve tried using compatible-screens). So it is with trepidation that I announce Rebuild on Google Play.

    But apparently that’s not enough. I knew the hardware base was fractured, but I didn’t realize the app market itself was also fractured. There must be 100 different sites that sell Android apps, and each one wants me to upload my binary to them along with screenshots and promo art in different arbitrary dimensions. Many of the Android “review” sites either require you to sell through their store, or charge $200 for a review. Am I really seeing this right?

    I’ve submitted to Amazon so I can get it on the Kindle Fire (although for $200 the PlayBook is a massively better hardware deal). But I’m not sure I have the stomach for all these other stores. Have I been naive to only buy apps through Google? Android users – where do you get your games?

  • Rebuild: Porting to the PlayBook via Adobe AIR and FlashDevelop

    Pugs Luv Beats
    I helped demo IGF nominees Faraway and the very musical Pugs Luv Beats.
    Last week was my first GDC as an indie developer, and hoh boy were those goodtimes!

    I helped Colin present in a talk about failure (Incredipede was the happy ending), and co-demoed Steph Thirion’s game Faraway in the Independent Games Festival. During the awards ceremony they gave us all BlackBerry PlayBooks, so I now have little excuse not to port Rebuild to it.

    I sat down to get it running today and spent far too long stepping through RiM’s convoluted developer security setup, which took me even longer than Apple’s similarly obtuse system. There are several tutorials out there but some were out of date or assume you have Flash Builder (I use FlashDevelop). So as of March 2012, here’s what you do to get your SWF running as an app on your PlayBook:

    Step 1: Request a CSJ code signing key from BlackBerry.com (takes a couple hours).

    Step 2: Get the Flex SDK, AIR SDK, and BlackBerry AIR SDK. I had trouble with Flex4.6 + Air3.2 so I used Flex4.5 with Air 3.1.

    Step 3: Start dev mode on your PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode.

    Step 4: Edit & execute the following to install the debug token on your PlayBook (ten steps and five different passwords, seriously?):

    @echo off

:: BlackBerry development token 
:: More information:
:: https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/documentation/ww_air_testing/Create_a_debug_token_CMD_ms_1968147_11.html
:: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/
:: http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/27280/Running_unsigned_apps_debug_tokens_1585072_11.jsp
:: http://openbbnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/installing-a-debug-token/
:: http://www.mellisdesigns.com/blog/?p=37

:: Path to Blackberry SDK
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin

:: Path to Java
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin

echo First get CSJ from https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/air/signingkeys
echo And start dev mode on PlayBook in Options > Security > Development Mode

:: begin setup
call blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD]

:: register CSJ locally
call blackberry-signer -register -csjpin [YOUR_PASSWORD] -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj

:: create p12 file
call blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -dname "cn=YOUR_NAME" -alias author

:: register device against CSJ
call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -register -csjpin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] client-PBDT-[XXXXXXXXXX].csj

:: later calls expect the p12 here for some reason
call copy author.p12 "C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Research In Motion\author.p12"

:: create the debug token BAR
call blackberry-debugtokenrequest -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -devicepin [YOUR_DEVICE_ID] debug_token.bar

:: sign bar with RIM (remote)
call blackberry-signer -verbose -cskpass [YOUR_PASSWORD] -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar PBDT

:: sign bar with developer (local)
call blackberry-signer -keystore author.p12 -storepass [YOUR_PASSWORD] debug_token.bar author

:: upload debug token to playbook (must be running in debug mode at this address & password)
call blackberry-deploy -installDebugToken debug_token.bar -device [DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]

:: echo important metadata
echo Add the following authorId to bar-descriptor.xml
call blackberry-airpackager -listManifest debug_token.bar

pause

    Step 5: Download this FlashDevelop project adapted from Studio Chris’ BlackBerry template, and edit airplaybook.as3proj and airplaybookConfig.xml to point to your SDK locations.

    Step 6: From FlashDevelop, hit F5 to build your SWF and test it locally using ADL.

    Step 7: Edit & execute the following to package and install the app:

    @echo off
:: AIR application packaging
:: More information:
:: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=CommandLineTools_5.html#1035959
:: http://www.hsharma.com/tutorials/10-easy-steps-to-package-and-sign-air-apps-for-playbook/

:: Path to Flex + AIR SDK
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex451AIR31\bin

:: Path to Blackberry
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Research in Motion\blackberry-tablet-sdk-2.0.0\bin

:: Path to Java
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin

:: package swf and assets into a bar then install to device and run the app
call blackberry-airpackager -package airplaybook.bar -installApp -launchApp application.xml bar-descriptor.xml airplaybook.swf blackberry-tablet-icon.png landscape-splash.png portrait-splash.png -devMode -device [YOUR_DEVICE_IP] -password [YOUR_PASSWORD]

pause

    If all goes well, you should see Main.as (a red square on a black background) appear on your BlackBerry. Chances are good that some parts of the debug token installation aren’t necessary but it got the job done.

    Rebuild actually ran the first time, and quite well which was an unexpected surprise. Now I need to adjust the fonts and aspect ratio, then go through what promises to be another certification nightmare to package it for sale in the BlackBerry App World. It’ll probably take two or three days total, so no great loss if it bombs.

    Rebuild should be out for the PlayBook by the end of the month!

  • Rebuild: iPhone, iPod touch & 99 cent sale

    I just released the version 2.0 update to Rebuild iOS, which adds support for iPhone 3GS/4/4S and iPod Touch 3&4. To celebrate, Rebuild is also on sale for 99 cents through the end of this weekend!

    I just got new business cards made up for GDC. This one is my favorite. :)

    I hope this update also addresses some of the stability issues that Rebuild has been having on the iPad 1. Did you realize an iPhone 4 has twice as much memory as the iPad 1? So it was easier than I’d expected to accommodate iPhones, and obviously I should have done this earlier. I can’t get enough of how nice the cartoony map graphics look on that double-density display.