Adding an in-app announcement system to your app is an excellent way to “Apple-proof” your app. With 2-4 week approval times, having an instantly changeable notification system is the best way to reliably reach your users.

Let’s say your app was just approved and you find out it has a terrible bug in it.  How are your going to inform your users of the workaround while you wait weeks for Apple to approve your update? Or, what if you just launched another app and you want to do a cross-promotion?  If you think ahead and spend a little effort upfront, you can avoid 1-star reviews and achieve effective real-time communication with your users.

In our most recent game, Depict, we decided to implement such a system.  Since Depict is a multiplayer game, we anticipated needing to announce server down-time or other unforeseen issues.  He’s how you can add the same system to your app in under an hour…

We used cocos2d for our app, but this method could easily be adapted for other presentation schemes. Our system shows a notification banner at the bottom of the title screen which may also link to a web address.

First, create a banner named banner.png and upload it to your website.  Here’s an example:

Next, create a text file named notification.txt and upload that too.

When your title screen initializes, use a synchronous ASIHTTPRequest to load the text file. If the file contains the word “none”, we’re done.  Otherwise, save the string for later and use another ASIHTTPRequest (asynchronous) to load the banner image.  When the banner finishes loading, turn it into a button and display it on-screen.  In the button handler code, check to see if the string we saved from the text file is a URL and if it is, navigate to it. That’s it!

download code snippets

The playable demo is no longer available. Visit the Depict Homepage for details about the game, including a video.

Depict has been submitted and should be available in the App Store within the next two weeks.  You’ll be able to pickup Depict for just $0.99 for a limited time directly following the release.  Read more about the game here.

Depict is a unique multiplayer drawing game that tests players’ ability to solve simple drawing puzzles with strangers and friends.

It’s the drawer’s job to create something that will get everyone else to guess the right word out of up to six possible words.

Sound easy? You only get 1024 jumbo-pixels and 30 seconds to do it.

Coming winter 2009

Check out a video of the game in action on YouTube.

As we near the final stages of development on our latest project, we’re scanning the radar to see who’s going to be top-dog in the iPhone social network arena.  Up to this point, we have been loyal fans of OpenFeint, but we’re keeping an open mind.  Our latest challenge is allowing players to invite friends to a game via their buddy list.  However, OpenFeint doesn’t seem to have any way to determine who’s online or offline.  We’ve dropped a line to Plus+ as well as OpenFeint to see if either can offer a solution.  May the best platform win!

(oh and yes, these are the only two platforms that matter right now)

Chuck the Ball and Ms. Chuck the Ball now support OpenFeint with over 15 achievements each.  There’s also leaderboards where you can compare the sum of all your scores across each game’s levels with other players’ scores.

When we decided to add social features to our Chuck the Ball games, we were faced with the task of selecting a social gaming network.  Our first choice was OpenFeint because it was free, had a lot of users, looked professional, and had an active developer community. OpenFeint also got bonus points for including the source code.  We quickly ruled out the other major players due to cost, publisher-specific requirements, and lack of users and brand recognition.

Confident in our choice, we forged ahead with the integration.  Fortunately for us, we were done forging after about 10 minutes!  The initial integration was a snap and we had the basic functionality up and running in no time.  Customizing the UI and changing a few of the behaviors of the client took a little work, but we easily found answers to all our questions in the forums.

Working with the OpenFeint platform was a pleasure from start to finish.  From the excellent API to the responsive and friendly support staff- I would recommend it to anyone.

Our only gripe: Everyone argues about what the name means and how to pronounce it.

Updates for Chuck the Ball and Ms. Chuck the Ball have been submitted to Apple.  Look for the new versions with OpenFeint support in the next few days.

Well- Casual Connect is over.  What did I learn? As Mike Peronto of Wild Tangent tried to explain with this disturbing Power Point Slide, there are many business models in the game industry.  Exiting this conference, I have realized that the game industry is no different than any other industry.  There are proven models that work if you follow the formula and spend millions of dollars.  These proven models will work even if your talent is mediocore and your ideas are lackluster.  However, there are other paths that rely on bright people working at their peak efficiency and following their dreams.

Fortunately for consumers, the big players in the market are taking notice of these highly talented small teams and are rapidly lowering the barriers for them to enter the market place.  There are more options for idie publishing than ever before.  Although this mean more competition, it also means it’s never been a better time to be an idie dev.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference very much, learned a great deal, and would recommend it to anyone in the industry (especially if you are local).  Oh, and if you can’t read the caption in the image, it says, “If you don’t buy this, we’ll kill the dog.”  When this slide came up, you could hear the air being sucked out of the room as everyone collectivley recoiled in horror.  I don’t think Mike got the reaction he was looking for.

This will be our first year at Casual Connect in Seattle.  I’m looking forward to it a lot. Unfortunately, Tim can’t make it so I’m going alone.  It’s going to be hard to decide which sessions to attend.  I don’t know anyone who is going, but I plan to chat up the Unity 3d crowd and maybe say hello to Sound Rangers.

We’re racing to get a respectable build of our unannounced title ready before the event even though we haven’t decided if we’re going to show it to anyone.  It’s good to have deadlines- meaningless or not.

Drop me a line if you’re going and want to hang out.

Do you enjoy reading reviews for apps that need to pay money to get reviewed, by reviewers who are getting paid to write them? In an attempt to make everyone happy, honest review sites are chipping away at their credibility by charging for expedited reviews.

As you would expect, part of our marketing strategy for Ms. Chuck involved shamelessly emailing every app review site and teenager with a YouTube channel begging for attention.  The experience was largely the same as it was for the original Chuck the Ball.  As we expected, the game received only a little attention and we went on with our lives.  However, this time around we received many more responses suggesting that we pay for an “expedited review”.  On the surface, this seems like an acceptable proposal: We pay a nominal fee of $50.00 and in return we get moved to the front of the increasingly large review queue.  Everyone is happy- we get our review, and the blogger is compensated for his or her effort.   It wasn’t until one of these sites sent out a poll asking devs their opinion about paying for expedited reviews that I realized how I really felt about it.

First, let’s be honest and call this arrangement what it really is: paid reviews.  All of the sites in question receive a constant stream of review requests.  To think that there is some mythical queue in which all submitted requests live with equal status based on submision date would be naive.  Besides, even if this were true, that means you can expect your review some time next year.  So what’s the big deal with paid reviews?

Even if a site remains completely impartial, not everyone who visits it will believe that it is.  I have faith that most of the sites offering this service are just trying to do what they think is best for everyone.  However, they are shooting themselves in the foot by degrading their credibility.

Who wants to read reviews for apps that need to pay money to get attention? With the exception of the occasional rant, I am looking for positive reviews when I visit review sites.  I already know that 99% of the apps in the App Store are worthless.  If a site truly remains impartial and writes honest reviews for the hoards of developers that are paying them, they will find their site polluted with articles no one cares about.

The review site isn’t the only victim here.  Naive developers desperate for attention pay for these reviews because they don’t see any other option.  Paying for a review will likely result in no noticable increase in sales or exposure.  Why?  If the app in question is not interesting enough to warrant being reviewed without being paid, that probably means no one reading the review will care.  In addition, even worthwhile apps have to pay the review tax because the reviewers are too busy to write any free reviews.

The App Store is a highly competitive arena with almost no middle class.  There is a small elite selling thousands a day and a huge lower-class making single digit sales.  The sooner everyone gets over this harsh reality the better.  Review sites should go back to reviewing what readers care about and developers should concentrate on creating worthwhile apps.

Thoughts?  We’d love to hear a reviewer’s perspective on this topic.