Submit a game in 2 weeks. Game submitted!

After 2 weeks and 2 days, Cow Abduct! has been submitted!

Here are the previous progress reports:

Submit a game in 2 weeks. Week 1 progress report...

Submit a game in 2 weeks. Week 2 progress report...

The original plan was to produce a small, polished game from start to finish in two weeks and submit on the 14th of May. I managed to submit on the 16th*, only 2 days over the original deadline so I'm very happy with that.

*Technically, I submitted at 2am on the 17th, but I'm going to let that slide ;)

I managed to knock off most of the remaining tasks on Monday. Implementing the in app purchase to remove advertising went a lot quicker than I expected and so did the extra polish tasks. After that, most of the time was spent on testing and debugging. Below are some of the main issues I encounted:

Admob, I had issues with iADs not falling back to AdMob properly, and general issues with the AdMob banner misbehaving and popping up/going away when it shouldn't. There was just a lot of general testing and stuffing around with this.

Memory leak in cocos2d-x. While profiling the game, I found that I was leaking 32 bytes per frame. Leaking *anything* per frame is pretty bad. I traced it down to a call to cocos2d-x's CCLabelBMFont::setString, which was allocating 32 bytes when it was called. I looked through cocos2d-x's diff history and it looks like the whole text rendering system was given an overhaul and optimised recently, which is why I didn't see this bug in my previous game. This wasn't too hard to patch myself, I basically got rid of the heap alloc and used some fixed memory.

Strange bug in cocos2d-x where the keyboard would just pop up and stay there after clicking an ad. Luckily someone else had ran into this, and a patch was made available to fix the issue.

The issues in cocos2d-x highlight the importance of having source access to any third party libraries you rely on, especially if you are pressed for time. You can't always rely on bugs being fixed or coming out in a timely enough manner for you, and when you are far enough into a project, patching is a lot easier than upgrading the whole library.

Anyway, following on from what I've been doing in previous update posts, here is a dump of my Perforce changelist:

Change 267 on 2012/05/17 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - SUBMISSION BUILD - sync AdsRemoved userdefault as soon as it is set.

Change 266 on 2012/05/17 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - SUBMISSION BUILD

Change 265 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - patched cocos2d-x issue where keyboard will pop up and not dissapear after opening an admob ad cow - halt and resume game when user clicks on an ad

Change 264 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - make ads always show. do a check to make sure checkCowPosition recursion depth doesn't get out of hand and blow the stack.

Change 263 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - update cleaner ufo sprites (accidentally exported with pencil marks layer previously) cow - updated about screen

Change 262 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - increase cow bounding box size. ** submission candidated **

Change 261 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - fixed ufo beam being always on (due to bad sprite expot). * submission candidate *

Change 260 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - hide ad bar in game loop to super make sure it won't show in game. *submission candidate build*

Change 259 on 2012/05/16 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - updated version number. submision candidate build.

Change 258 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - fixed more memory leaks

Change 257 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - fix memory leaks

Change 256 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - tap screen in main menu makes alien look at you

Change 255 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - fixed admob fallback not showing in main menu

Change 254 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added eye animations in game

Change 253 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added ufo die sound

Change 252 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added sound for when bird collides with ufo. cow - fixed ads not showing up in pause and restart screens.

Change 251 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added cow abduct sound

Change 250 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - handle game interuptions

Change 249 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added a waiting dialoge for when app is contacting app store for iap

Change 248 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - testflight sdk integration

Change 247 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - tweaked bird death particles a bit

Change 246 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - added restore purchases button to about screen

Change 245 on 2012/05/15 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - implemented iap to remove ads

Change 244 on 2012/05/14 by chenpo@cps_macbook cow - implemented iAd fallback to AdMob

Cow Abduct! will be available for free on the App Store very soon!