Strange Flavour Developer Diary

Jailbreaking:

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-07-17T19:21:54+01:00

We had a big problem on the launch of Warpack: Grunts when it turned out that some players who had Jailbroken their devices were getting crashes at the start of the game. Obviously this got us a whole bunch of bad reviews. Very very few of them mentioning that actually, they'd broken their phone.

I also had quite a few emails from Jailbreak users asking if we were doing it deliberately and when would we fix it.

So I'd like to clarify a few things. Firstly, there was no deliberate attempt to block jailbroken devices or mess with them. The bug is entirely in the jailbreak software itself which obviously has a glitch that's causing the problem. Whatever it is, it causes Grunts to crash on some devices when installed after the jailbreak takes place (one fix is to install it first, then jailbreak). It happens that Grunts is one of very few apps that shows this bug in the jailbreak software at the moment, but the bug's there and will probably cause you other problems at some point.

Secondly, the problem is, there's absolutely nothing we can do to fix this problem. Grunts is written as an iPhone OS application and has no problems when tested against a real iPhone or iPod Touch. Jailbroken users have to understand that when you jailbreak, you are modifying your device and no longer benefit from the concept of a standard devices that apps can be tested on. So it's entirely up to you as a jailbreak user to fix any issues it may cause.

We had a big discussion after this problem came up about what to do for future builds. We ruled out testing against jailbroken phones because there's no way to do it properly. The very nature of hacking an iPhone device makes it an untestable entity. Each one is done differently (that's kind of the point) and none follow any standards. If we added a whole suite of tests and modifications to suit jailbroken devices, we'd use up time we could use a lot more productively to work on updates for the users who haven't broken their phones and new games.

We also discussed possibly blocking jailbroken users as a future policy. For the moment we ruled that out too, as jailbroken users are about 12% of our legitimate users (they're around 25% of them as far as stats are concerned, but half of those stole the games so we don't care about them). This is a policy we'll be monitoring as things go on though. If there's a 10% chance that any game that's released will get a chunk of bad reviews because a section of players have installed something else that randomly breaks stuff then we may have to reconsider this policy.

So, Jailbroken users. Please remember that your iPhone or iPod isn't a standard one, we don't mind that. But if your non standard installation is causing you problems, it's up to you (and the jailbreaking community) to fix the problem.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-07-15T00:52:18+01:00

You can find us on Facebook under Strange Flavour Ltd and just recently on Twitter as StrangeFlavour, ZwilnikSF and VengSF, if you want to hear the somewhat loony rambling on from us both.

Warpack Grunts Update (Aaron's run out of ideas for non titles)

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-07-15T00:51:46+01:00

Grunts 1.01 update has been submitted and theoretically could be out any day now. If you bought or are thinking of buying Grunts, the 1.01 update adds a little thank you for early adopters by means of a new game mode “In a tank”
so grab it before the update comes out, otherwise the new mode will be available in the next update.

insert joke about never using titles here..

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-06-29T02:28:19+01:00

So, our latest game Warpack: Grunts is out, after an absolutely manic submission week where we submitted Grunts, the free "how to write an OpenGL app for iPhone" game Space Hike and a big OS 3.0 update for Flick Fishing in the same week. Then Flick Fishing went past the million sales mark.

I'm knackered! But now I get to play with trains for a bit while I do research for our next game, TrackZ Pocket Railway :)

Important Title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-02-26T16:06:15+00:00

Strange Flavour donating all proceeds from Japanese iPhone App Store sales to Sea Shepherd

With Japanese government sponsoring illegal whaling in the Antarctic whale sanctuary, Strange Flavour no longer feel that they can trade in a country where tax money from sales of their games is sponsoring the illegal extermination of endangered species.

Recent attacks with military acoustic weapons and metal projectiles on Sea Shepherd crew and their helicopter as well as multiple attempts to ram the Sea Shepherd’s ship the Steve Irwin have shown just how violent the illegal whalers are prepared to be.

As such, Strange Flavour Ltd. will be donating all their proceeds from their games, including the best selling SlotZ Racer and Flick Sports Fishing from the Japanese iPhone app store to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

“While donating our proceeds from the Japanese App Store is very minor in the scheme of things, we’d like the Japanese government to see that the antics of its illegal whaling industry are both embarrassing Japan and its people and causing it to lose face in a world where modern nations are realising the need to protect the environment and work together to avoid the extinction of critical species. All we can do is show our disgust at the illegal whalers and the government that wastes its tax payers money in propping up their loss making industry.

We hold our Japanese gamers in the highest respect, so we decided to do this rather than penalise them by removing our games from sale in Japan.” - Aaron Fothergill, Managing Director Strange Flavour Ltd.

Ian Lynch Smith, President of Freeverse has said "Our development partner Strange Flavour's passion for games is only matched by their ardent concern for our planet. Freeverse respects their decision and joins them in urging an immediate end to all illegal whaling."

Established in 1977, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organisation. Their mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.

http://www.seashepherd.org

Title left intentionally blank

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-02-05T19:13:19+00:00

Thanks to everyone who gave us great feedback on the initial version of SlotZ Racer!
Along with the features we wanted to add, the extra user requests and information has allowed us to put together a great 1.1 update for SlotZ with all sorts of new toys.
I'm also putting the final touches on a little extra SlotZ related toy for everyone as a bit of a thank you. More details soon! :)

Title 1.1

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-01-21T22:34:20+00:00

A big thanks to everyone’s who’s bought our latest iPhone game SlotZ Racer and been so positive about it. Now our publishers Freeverse don’t think we’re quite so mad (major kudos for them backing us all the way even though they thought we were mad!).

The upshot is of course that I get to allocate a bit of my time to tuning, tweaking and generally adding stuff to SlotZ that it wasn’t feasible to do for the 1.0 release. There’s been a lot of feature requests, most of which were within what I’d call sane, although I’m someone who thinks that writing a single button game for a phone that has multitouch and accelerometer input is sane, so who’s to say ;)

Combine everyone’s wishlist with the bits we wanted to add once the resources were available and you end up with a pretty big list, so I can see it being split over a couple of updates (that way it doesn’t stall in approval for 2 weeks while some poor tester at Apple has to wade through a giant test list and I can get the more important ones in and on your iPhones and iPods without too long a wait).

The first of the big features was one we wanted to do but as a large chunk of the work was done over the Christmas break while Freeverse’s server team were away, had to wait until now to do. That’s the ability to email a track you’ve designed to your friends. Build it, email it and they get a simple code to download it and race on it. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi network you can also quickly zap a track from one iPhone to another.

I’ve also been working on improvements to the track editor. There’s nothing like letting 50,000 people play with something to get feedback for possible tuning. I’ve already got the ability to do more than one bridge height in and I’m looking at some navigation controls to make it easier to see your track and hop around editing it.

In the game itself, I’ve made the single player left hand compatible (the whole screen is now the button) and I’m doing some tuning to the race stats info. Things like flashing up a fuel warning when you’re about to run out of fuel for instance :) There’s also a few more options going in for messing with the CPU players. You get to tweak an “oops” factor for them. By default they know how to go round corners, but the more oops they get, the more likely they are to overcook it on a bend and spin off. If you want a bit more of a challenge, there’s a strict championship option that switches off the ability to restart races in a championship so you have to complete it without cheating (that includes changing the speed, grip and acceleration settings). Upside is you get an extra reward for winning :)

Funny thing is, nobody’s found all the features of the current build yet. We’ve got an annoying habit of adding hidden musical instruments in our iPhone games, the Plankophone in Plank and Quackophone in Flick Fishing for instance. Admittedly this one’s hidden a bit better. Then again, when you’re hunting for hidden stuff, practice always makes perfect and at least we didn’t call the game iiiiiiiiiFlower :)

More info as I wantonly chuck stuff in :)

New years resolution:- think of title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2009-01-12T17:21:01+00:00

So, a new year and an actual update to our website!
It's a bit iPhone heavy on the front page at the moment, but don't worry, I'm still busy on Airburst for XBLA. I just had to sidetrack for a month to meet a few contractual obligations and earn some money to pay the electricity bill.

On the iPhone front, after the rip roaring success of Flick Fishing, we're just about to submit SlotZ Racer to the App Store. I know it's not particularly British of me to toot my own horn or anything, but it's bloody brilliant so buy it now!

Slightly more serious title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-09-17T22:19:42+01:00

If anyone is feeling like helping show how generally cool and heroic Xbox 360 gamers are or if you just want a chance to win some very cool prizes, pop to this link and donate $6.12 (or more!) to a very worthy cause and help save a life.

link: http://www.edithowens.com/power360/index.html

Next week's title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-09-11T23:03:36+01:00

Busy busy busy. I just fixed a nagging bug when I realised some of our network problems were from yesterday's switching on of the Large Hadron Colider at CERN.
Turns out our time travelling network packets have been popping in and out of existence over there and raising eyebrows, so we're tagging them with Strange Flavour quarks so they don't mess with their results.

This has had some side benefits as not only does our using the mini black hole they generated there keep it busy with our network traffic, it also means we don't have to generate one in your Xbox to achieve the whole "spin the network packets round a black hole so they go backwards in time" trick, which should save each player a few gigawatts of power.

Airburst iPhone & Zune Wallpapers

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-07-23T00:58:25+01:00

Airburst XBLA iPhone/iPod Touch and Zune Wallpapers are now up in the Airburst XBLA section on the site.
Will be more of those to come so stayed tuned :)

Airburst XBLA movie teaser

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-07-23T00:58:29+01:00

Things are starting to come together on Airburst now. Enough that we’ve been able to stick together a short teaser video of a small part of the game’s action. It’s still work in progress of course, but you get to see a couple of elements :)

Click here for larger version

or the YouTube verson to share among friends :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0JcGbuUns

This way to the secret title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-07-17T20:59:47+01:00

The XBLA version of Airburst is now testing on Partnernet, the special testing network for Xbox developers. We’ve put it up so we can run some tests, but also so other friendly neighbourhood Xbox devs can have a play :)

It’s still under NDA and there’s plenty of work left for me to do, so don’t post screenshots or anything, but feel free to drop me a line if you spot anything that shouldn’t be there.

Oh, and one feature just for the devs as it won’t be in the final version due to the new Dashboard they showed at E3. Check out the dash when you’re in Airburst ;)

X5560 Experimental Title

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-06-18T21:37:25+01:00

Getting there!
Still a while to go before Airburst is ready for everyone to play on their Xboxes (and even if I knew when it was likely to be released, I wouldn't be allowed to say anyway), but we've just passed an important development milestone and things are definitely taking shape.
We're still working flat out to get everything finished, but hopefully should have a little bit of time to put together a bit of gameplay video and some more screenshots for everyone to have a look at.

Get your titles from Titles R Us!

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-02-15T00:13:50+00:00

Things are progressing pretty well at the moment. Hopefully at some point we'll be allowed to show some screenshots, but until then I get to do vague blog posts about stuff without giving away any real details :)

I've been doing a lot of work on the network code recently with a lot of help from Martin Piper over at ReplicaNet. It's mildly brain boggling trying to persuade network packets to time travel in order to cover the inherent lag you get when communicating over the net, but so far it's working pretty well. Once you get around the problem of network packets going back in time and killing their own grandparents it's a lot easier.

We've also got another testing party coming up soon. It'll be interesting to compare the feedback from that to the initial one we had here, especially as Airburst is a bit more feature complete now.

Insert witty title here

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2007-12-04T14:44:07+00:00

ok, so nearly falling back into my old ways of forgetting to post anything for ages. Possibly because I'm working hard on Airburst, but more likely because the life of a games developer isn't half as exciting as some people think!

There's also the problem of having to be careful what I actually write here. I can't give any details on release dates or game features as that makes the marketing team unhappy. Making the marketing team unhappy is never a good plan.

I could talk about technical stuff of course, except that rather a lot of it is under NDA. That and every coder I've worked with knows I'm not a spectacularly technical coder anyway ;)

The actual coding and design is progressing nicely (in a non specific not giving out any sort of timescale or feature information kind of way), I'm having fun messing with the controls. Going from the original Airburst's 3 key controls to having the 360 Controller's array of buttons was a classic temptation to completely overcomplicate things, but I've managed to hold off from forcing you to require the chatpad to have enough buttons to control everything (actually, control is much easier on the 360 controller than the old keyboard controls).

We've been experimenting with different control layouts and options too, which is always fun. Especially when the controls have to work for all the different game types and for as wide an age range as possible. Airburst Extreme's players range from 5 year olds to granddads, so I need to make sure that we're not excluding anyone.

you mean I have to do titles each post?!

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2007-11-25T18:11:46+00:00

So, we had our first testing party on Friday night. Just a few friends round to see how much they can break the game at this early stage and to try out a few new elements in it. Turns out they can break a lot, so plenty of work for me this weekend :)

look an update!

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2007-11-18T18:40:54+00:00

Working on (amongst other things) the game selector this weekend.

To clear up some early confusion when we first mentioned we were doing Airburst for the Xbox 360, this is a completely new Airburst. We wanted to call it Airburst 360, but the lawyers pointed out we'd need to release another 357 versions of the game before we could get away with that. As a good chunk of Xbox owners won't have seen either Airburst or Airburst Extreme yet, we went with the easy option and just called it Airburst again. Mac users can think of it as Airburst 3 if they want :)

For those Xbox gamers that haven't heard about Airburst yet, it's an extreme sport played at high altitude. Each player sits on a raft of balloons and controls a bat. Razor sharp flying balls called bursters are then released and players have to defend their balloons while trying to burst their opponents to knock them out of the sky. Add in a whole bunch of powerups and different game modes, plus each character having an Extreme power to try and tilt the balance in their favour and that's Airburst in a nutshell.

For those of you that have played Airburst and/or Airburst Extreme, this version is all the best game modes from the first two (without having to play through the Story mode we added in Airburst Extreme to unlock them) with a whole new, written from scratch engine so we could tune everything for the 360 and its controllers (including a certain new controller with oversized buttons).

Airburst Dev Diary

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2007-11-16T05:07:58+00:00

testing testing... is this thing on... etc.

Now we've officially 'mentioned' that we're working on Airburst for Xbox LIVE Arcade it's safe for me to do a small dev diary on the project.

With my normal blog/diary update rate that means the Airburst diary will probably have this post and another just after the game's released, but I'll try and update a little more regularly than I normally do :)

{Generic Title #23}

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-02-26T16:27:20+00:00

In a break with games industry tradition, we put a large chunk of the sound effects in over the weekend (rather than on the last day before the game goes to testing as is normal practice). Adam actually built a bunch of the outboard gear and a synthesiser from scratch for Airburst, so there aren't very many canned samples (other than the ones where we were bashing cans together) in this game. I'm trying to persuade him to put his build diary back up on his Jaffamountain.com site so all the fans of his new hobby of messing around with Arduino boards and his somewhat unique* Weird Sound Generator build can see the latest photos :)

But in the meantime, here's a couple of shots.

* Yes, I know, pretty much all the WSGs are unique have a look at some of the others..

Title not found

speedghost@btinternet.com — 2008-03-10T17:51:34+00:00

No, it's not done yet!

We have however put a couple of screenshots up (www.unscripted360.com and www.360sync.com got them up first over the weekend) to show the work in progress. Hopefully more shots and stuff as we go.