Word Association Football now released in the App Store

bowerandy · July 2013

It's taken a while but my new word association game is now available on the App Store. It's an iOS game that's free to play and similar in some ways to other popular titles like 4 Pics 1 Word.

The game was originally started as an an experiment to see how quickly something built in Gideros could be designed from start to finish. The main (easy) game was working in 2 days and the harder game was working after one week. I'd hoped to get the whole thing out in only three weeks. Unfortunately (from the point of view of this experiment at least) the rest of the development (social integration, collection of picture resources, website etc) has taken the total time up to around 10 weeks. Let's see if it has all been worth it!

If you can, please give it a try and spread the word.

Website: http://wafga.me
App Store: Click Here

Best regards

PS: For those of you ( @MikeHart , perhaps) who may be wondering what has happened to my other game in development, "Spin Off Racer", I've temporarily postponed this release while I go through some tweaks with the gameplay.

phongtt · July 2013

Great game. Very polished! Kongoratz!

phongtt · July 2013

@bowerandy
One question: are you using Parse for this game?

hgvyas123 · July 2013

Kongoratz

ArtLeeApps · July 2013

for i=1, #giderosians do
print("Kongoratz :-bd ")
end

OZApps · July 2013

for i=1, #giderosians do
print("Kongoratz :-bd ")
end

Try using the ipairs instead, you will get everything

 for i,j in ipairs(giderosians) do
  print ("Kongoratz :-bd ")
 end

for those that might have a non index entry, like

  giderosians.ozapps = "Jayant" -- or
  giderosians.moderator = "Arturs Sawseen" -- etc, etc

* just a small tip on using loops with Lua (if you do end up mixing them or having a 0 based index)

OZApps · July 2013

@bowerandy, congratulations, it looks amazing.

bowerandy · July 2013

@phongtt, no I'm not using Parse, although I did consider it. I wanted to make use of the push notifications feature in Parse but I didn't really need the user logins etc, I was a bit worried that if I had a major success (one always has to hope for the best) then the Parse free plan would run out quite quickly even though at first sight it looks generous.

So for the first version I thought I'd dispense with Push and set up my own server to do this at some point in the future. Instead I have my own "Pull" notifications built in, which (when turned on) will bring up some rather neat HTML5 animated interstitials pulled from the game website.

The technologies in use are:
1) BhWax

2) iOS 5+ Facebook and Twitter posting. I tried the Facebook Api but it was more trouble than it was worth frankly. I'd say that I wasted more time on FB integration than any other single aspect of the development.

3) Flurry. This is used for analytics and "real" crash reporting (I have dispensed with Crashlytics because I didn't much care for their website interface). Lua crash logging is now done using Flurry events that attach a Lua stack trace. This is useful because I've already had a few crashes and have got back a good stack trace, eg:

stack: | PictureGame:242: in function 'enableRailTaps' | PictureGame:285: in function 'removeGuessPicture' | PictureGame:30: in function <PictureGame:25> | GiderosCodingEasy:106: in function 'dispatchEvent' | BhTap:31: in function 'dispatchTapEvent' |

4) AskingPoint (www.askingpoint.com) another analytics service that also offers a "smart" Ratings Booster. They also offer Pull Notifications but I don't use those because they were easy to do myself. Both Flurry and AskingPoint are integrated using Wax and therefor don't require plugins.

5) www.crestock.com. I used a monthly plan to download the 600 royalty free images used in the game. I had to build in some encryption (using an Objctive C library called from Wax) to avoid having the images easily extra table from the game bundle.

That's all I can think of right now.

Best regards

phongtt · July 2013

Brilliant! Thanks a lot for sharing the experience!

vitalitymobile · July 2013

@bowerandy, Kongoratz!

ar2rsawseen · July 2013

Finally, been waiting for something released from you, will definitely check it out

bowerandy · July 2013

@phongtt, I forgot to mention:

6) ChartBoost (www.chartboost.com) for 3rd party interstitial ads. These only shown every third game.

Best regards

Platypus · July 2013

Bloody impressive production quality.

(P.S. I recognised your "(((boing)))" as soon as the Twitter logo moved. Very nice!)

Platypus · July 2013

Perhaps the following only occurs on my device, or perhaps you already know, but there is no visual or auditory feedback when you select one of the blank destination squares (which are selectable).

Mells · July 2013

@bowerandy
Congratulations, and nice effort on the design side

phongtt · July 2013

@bowerandy What's special about Flurry comparing to Critterism, Crashlytics,...?

bowerandy · July 2013

@Platypus, yes you're right about that feedback issue. That selection of the picture slots was one of the last things I added and I guess I rushed it a bit. I'll fix it in the next version.

best regards

bowerandy · July 2013

@phongtt, the main reason I changed was that I saw a way to do the Lua crash logging in Flurry and, because, I was already using this it seemed sensible to use its library and not have to load up Crashlytics into the app. Just one less thing to think about.

The other good thing is that most of the work is now done up in Lua. One still needs a plugin to install the logging of console messages to a file but that's now all it does. On app start it checks to see if the stdout file has a stack dump in it (which means it crashed last time) and then logs this as a normal Flurry event. Then the file is cleared down. This is pretty much the same as the way the other crash loggers work - they all have to send the crash info the next time the app is started.

Flurry has recently introduced a mechanism (in beta at present) for handling real crashes (i.e. one where something happens outside of Lua) so I can use this for that side of things too.

I think I can feel a blog post about this coming on.

best regards

OZApps · July 2013

@bowerandy, I am not sure if it is the graphics when you created them or when they get scaled, on the iPhone5, the graphics look as it they have lost a bit of their bytes (pardon the pun) not solid rectangular, look at the (c) and the bottom of the upper box with the 22 (Play easy)

bowerandy · July 2013

@OZApps, yes, thanks for the report. I must admit that I saw this before but only on a non-retina iPad. It is not anything to do with the graphics themselves. If you look at the graphics from the game resources in WafSheet.png and WafSheet@2x.png they are pristine. I'm note sure what else to think but could it be a bug in Gideros itself (@atilim?).

Has anyone else noticed anything like this in their projects?

best regards

unlying · July 2013

@bowerandy
I have this in all my projects. Annoying for me, but users doesn't moan about this.

atilim · July 2013

@bowerandy I've installed your game on both iPod touch 5th gen and iPhone 4S but cannot see the problem.

@OZApps Can you give me any hints to produce it? Also your screenshot is 640 x 960 which is not iPhone 5. :-/

bowerandy · July 2013

@atilim, I have only ever seen this problem when using a non-retina iPad 1. I just fired the game up on this as a real device and here is the screenshot:

Note the artifacts with the Play Nice button and most of the buttons at the bottom of the screen.

best regards

atilim · July 2013

I see. let me look at it. (these buttons are all .png files, right?)

I know these kinds of artifacts happen when the sprite is exactly placed at [some integer] + 0.5. maybe even adding a small amount (e.g. 0.01) to your coordinates can solve the problem.

ar2rsawseen · July 2013

Do you use texture filtering? Automatic Scaling?
Are images positioned in full pixels, or there may be half pixel positions (like it happened with texts before)

bowerandy · July 2013

@atilim, I forgot to mention that I'm still using 2012.9.10

Yes, all of the buttons are PNG files. They are compiled into a texture sheet using TexturePacker and the PNG files from that look fine. E-mail me if you'd like a copy of any of the files.

best regards

bowerandy · July 2013

@ar2rsawseen, I am using texture filtering and Pixel Perfect. It is very possible that there are fractional coordinates since all of the screens are read from SVG files that specify the layout. For example, the background of the Play Nice button is represented by:

image overflow="visible" enable-background="new    " width="785" height="586" id="bg_4_" xlink:href="../Images/Art/PlayNiceButtonBackground.png"  transform="matrix(0.5 0 0 0.5 129.25 169.5)">
/image>

However, the Play Tough button below it, which appears okay, also has fractional coordinates:

image overflow="visible" enable-background="new    " width="785" height="586" id="bg_5_" xlink:href="../Images/Art/PlayToughButtonBackground.png"  transform="matrix(0.5 0 0 0.5 129.25 507.5)">
/image>

best regards

atilim · July 2013

@bowerandy The coordinates of [some integer]+0.5 are sometimes problematic and sometimes not. If you change them to 0.499 or 0.501, most probably the problem will disappear.

bowerandy · July 2013

@atilim, that might be tricky to achieve easily without manually editing all the SVG files.

Can I just subtract 0.001 from all coordinates to achieve the same effect?

best regards

atilim · July 2013

Can I just subtract 0.001 from all coordinates to achieve the same effect?

Yes.

phongtt · July 2013

@phongtt, the main reason I changed was that I saw a way to do the Lua crash logging in Flurry and, because, I was already using this it seemed sensible to use its library and not have to load up Crashlytics into the app. Just one less thing to think about.

The other good thing is that most of the work is now done up in Lua. One still needs a plugin to install the logging of console messages to a file but that's now all it does. On app start it checks to see if the stdout file has a stack dump in it (which means it crashed last time) and then logs this as a normal Flurry event. Then the file is cleared down. This is pretty much the same as the way the other crash loggers work - they all have to send the crash info the next time the app is started.

Flurry has recently introduced a mechanism (in beta at present) for handling real crashes (i.e. one where something happens outside of Lua) so I can use this for that side of things too.

I think I can feel a blog post about this coming on.

best regards

Can't wait!

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Word Association Football now released in the App Store

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