It is not a rip off...I still work a very active day job and couldn't continue full-time development. Pinger has picked up where I left off :).

StickWars 2 is also supported by cocos2d, so another cocos2d is rocking up the charts :). w00t!

Yup, I was wondering if it's some kind of rip off as well, but seems it's not:

http://johnehartzog.com/2010/11/stickwars-2-is-alive/

It is against AppStore guidelines to have the name of another competitor, or app, in the keywords - however Apple are probably running a script to test the keywords against known banned keys - so unless you are added it wont be tested. They might do this manually, but they will definitely do it if you complain. This guy would be pulled.

Hey I've just seen StickWars in free charts and StickWars 2 in paid charts. Seems that making StickWars free was a good strategy to promote the sequel.
@LongJohnnyE, but it seems it's no longer developed by you, it's Pinger inc. Did you sell the IP ?

@LongJohnnyE intersting that Apple would release a game to the store that includes you games' name in the keywords. A friend of mine had an update (not the original mind you) rejected because he used the word 'breakout' which is pretty generic in his keywords.

Inconsistency in the review process continues to be a real pain!

You should have offered to let him leave them there for $50 lol.

@jd I just politely asked the dev of walkthrough publications to remove 'stickwars' from his keywords, and he said he would in the next update :).

About the OpenFeint stuff, even if I did get some deal out of it, it'd probably be under NDA, right?

That being said, I did not accept any money or similar 'bonus' when deciding which social network to use. I guess it was kind of lucky, since I made enough money from the sales of StickWars, I felt free in making the decision that was 'best for the game' in my opinion rather than that which may have been more profitable in the short term.

I have been told that in ONLY applies to in-app purchases, due to the way it works on the back end. I realized this was true when I tried to re-submit StickWars with in-app purchase when compiled for OS 3.0 minimum...a different screen popped up right after I uploaded it in iTunes Connect. There is some magic going on there that Apple doesn't disclose that apparently requires any application with in-app purchases included to be compiled for OS 3.0 at minimum.

So go ahead and include bluetooth p2p and compile for 2.x and gracefully degrade. You should be fine...I'm doing the same thing in my next game, and I'll let you know if I run into any problems.

"Basically it sat in queue for about 2 months as an update with in-app purchase, but it turns out any app that runs on OS 2.x can't include in-app purchases"

Do you know if thats for any 3.x feature that you degrade if the user is running 2.x. So if you add p2p bluetooth networking if the user is running 3.x, but the game runs fine in 2.x just not with the p2p feature. Do you think that would get in to limbo too?

Well bc your game is so popular, maybe they would throw some cash your way to get you to use OF over a competitor so they could get a bigger userbase. Or give you free advertising.

What deal would I negotiate? OpenFeint is free for users and developers :).

"I found that data extremely value not only for deciding how to add updates to my app, but when it came time to negotiate with companies who wanted to work with me"

@LJE, were you able to get some sort of deal with OpenFeint?

@jptsetung I run the pinch media analytics, which lets me see non-indetenifying stats like that. I actually caught a bit of attention because of that (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_iphone_users_your_apps_are_spying_on_you.php) but my response was "I can't see anything personal, and without this data I would have to guess at how to structure my updates. I'm keeping it...".

I found that data extremely value not only for deciding how to add updates to my app, but when it came time to negotiate with companies who wanted to work with me, I could prove how valueable my app is by saying things like "the average user who loads my game once in a day plays it for 40 minutes that day". Those kind of facts are powerful bargaining chips, but only if you are aware of them and can back them up.

And it's not exactly 40% of users are on OS 2.x. It's kinda complicated, but as far as new users purchasing the game OS 2.x users are closer to like 20% or something. But there are a large number of OS 2.x devices who continue to install the updates I send out, so I had to keep them in mind.

That's really strange they didn't give any feedback.

I read your forum post and i have a side question. How do you know that 40% of our players are on OS2.x ?

They never actually rejected it. It just sat there in queue with no feedback for about 1.5 months, until I learned from an outside source that they have an unspoken policy of neither rejecting nor accepting apps which do that.

I just rejected the binary myself and sent them a new game instead :).

Waiting one month to get a rejection for a reason you could not know is bad. I feel sorry for you.

And I think its a really bad decision to require 3.0 for all apps that have in-app purchases. Especially when now also free apps can have this.

Looking forward for you challenge mode.

- zombie

Oh wow. So that's how this came about. I haven't played the game in months and I had assumed your in-app purchase update went through in August. Making it into it's own app I guess was the best way to do it at this point. That sucks that you lost all that time. Good luck. The challenges look fun.

I'm not doing in-app purchases until more people upgrade to 3.x+ - which I think is why Apple is pushing it to begin with. They want everybody to upgrade.

@jptsetung oh right, I forgot to announce here. Yea, StickWars Ultimate Challenge is live. You can read some about the funny story about the drama I went through here http://johnehartzog.com/forums/showthread.php?t=605.

Basically it sat in queue for about 2 months as an update with in-app purchase, but it turns out any app that runs on OS 2.x can't include in-app purchases, even if it gracefully degrades.

At this point, I'm a bit jaded from the whole experience, but I'm getting back into it and will start pumping out some fun updates soon :).

@jd I used to go through and email developers who did the "This game is great for fans of StickWars, Flight Control, etc..." and ask them to remove the name of my game from the description if their game was in no related or similar to mine. At some point I got tired of it and gave up ;).

Let us know how this pans out. Gotta ride the name recognition as long as you can. Good luck!

I love how a search for stickwars (one word) brings up two unrelated apps from walkthrough publications. They should be reported for putting stickwars in their keywords.

StickWars ultimate challenge :) ?

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=332426830&mt=8

After having a closer look at the other games in this magazine the practicality factor seems to be and average of 2-3.
Where the weather app reviews have a average of 4-5.

In that case, I think that's a silly criteria. How often in real life do you have a need to...launch a sheep into space, fight in a robot suit, or kill an army of zombies (hopefully not)?

Still, glad to see they liked the game overall.

I thought it meant attacking a wall with really skinny people isn't practical. Which is probably true.

@dnsolo Do what SmallMike suggested, it worked great for me.

@MrCoCheese thanks a lot for posting that! I enjoy reading reviews of my apps, and now I need to try to track down a copy of that magazine.

I agree though, wth is practicality? If I got a 2...I bet it means StickWars crashes a lot...which it does, so I wouldn't blame them.

The [OpenFeint initializeWithProductKey...] call should go in your applicationDidFinishLaunching method.

When the user clicks the button, you can just call [OpenFeint launchDashboard]; Since you have already called initializeWithProductKey you do not need to track whether or not OF has been initialized. If there is no Internet access the offline dashboard will be opened (assuming you are using 2.1).

Hi all,

I'm trying to integrate 'OpenFeint' into my game but have hit a problem. I understand that 'LongJohnnyE' has successfully integrated this technology into his StickWars game, perhaps you could advise me, thanks?

I don't think the way I'm launching OpenFeint is correct. The first time I click on the OpenFeint button the 'Setup Screen' appears, I then select the OK button to set up a user account. This all works fine. However, when I shutdown and then relaunch my game (and then click on the OpenFeint button) all that happens is a 'pop up' notification message appears at the bottom of the screen,
eg... "Logged into OpenFeint as: myUserName"

What I need to happen is for OpenFeint to launch the main 'OpenFeint GUI' screen without the user having to click on the same OpenFeint button twice (i.e. clicking on the same OpenFeint button twice works fine and displays the main OpenFeint GUI, but it's not ideal and will confuse users). Hope this all makes sense!

My existing code is below:

-(void)runOpenFeint {
// Initialise OpenFeint system if required
if([GlobalDataManager sharedDataManager].openFeintLaunched) {
[OpenFeint launchDashboard];
}
else {
[OpenFeint initializeWithProductKey:@"MY_KEY" andSecret:@"MY_SECRET" andDisplayName:@"Raider"
andSettings:nil andDelegate:nil];
[GlobalDataManager sharedDataManager].openFeintLaunched = YES;
}
}

Practicality?

Hi LongJohnnyE,

I have just bought the latest iPhone App Directory magazine and they have reviewed you app.
It is half a page, here are the scores:

Longevity 4
Fun Factor 4
Practicality 2
Value 4
Overall 4