Robot App: Our IPhone Game Development story
It's been a really crazy 4 weeks of coding and hacking Robot App (we've got a name for it but we're just holding it back till the app is accepted by Apple). Robot App is our first and a robot fighting arcade style IPhone game. You basically start off as a tincap robot, whatever that means I just coined that up, and beat the hell out of other robots in an arcade style setting. So think Street Fighters but with retro style robots. Derek is the mastermind behind all the artwork, graphics and the main concept of Robot App. He is one talented illustrator.
I got to know Derek through ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com through a posting that he wrote looking for a programmer to collaborate on IPhone apps. I left a comment on his post and the rest is all history. We started brainstorming and by early April, we settled on the concept of Robot App. Along the way, we stumbled into many potholes such as things like blurry pngs that appear fine on our Macs but came up blurry on the iPhone (both simulator and hardware). That set us back a couple of days trying to figure out what's wrong. Then we stumbled on AdHoc distribution like many developers did.I took extra time to read up on all the documents for Adhoc distribution just to make sure that I do not get into an endless loop like many other developers were experiencing with trying to send out test builds using AdHoc Distribution. That didn't help. We still ended up burning a few days trying to get the adhoc builds "work" on Derek's phone. The build was installed on his IPhone but it just crashes on start. We went through iterations of debugging and transferring of debug logs.
Thu Apr 30 00:58:43 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[61] syscall_builtin_profile: /private/var/mobile/Applications/A30C2E38-7AEC-4F7B-A4BD-D911E6009EDD.sb (seatbelt)
Thu Apr 30 00:58:43 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[61] Builtin profile: container (seatbelt)
Thu Apr 30 00:58:43 unknown SpringBoard[22] <Warning>: Unable to obtain task name port for net.leftrightstudios.robot. Either it failed to exec or it terminated immediately: (os/kern) failure
Our IPhone AdHoc Distribution
He was able to install the app, it's just when starting the app, it terminates and goes back to Springboard. In the end, we figured out that his phone had some funky configuration
and installed the application with some weird permission settings. We tried many different ideas, like resetting the phone, restoring to a clean state and restoring in iTunes. All those did not work. It was only till Derek suggested booting over to windows and tried using iTunes in Windows did an AdHoc install and miraculously that works. We're still not really sure why iTunes in Windows had installed the app properly.
Robot App Project Stats
Project Folder created: April 9th 2009
Lines of code: 5032 lines
Number of files: 30
Application size (compressed): 6.3MB
Revision control for our project resources: dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com)
