Liv Games are my partners in crime, they're taking care of the publishing aspects of things so that I can concentrate on coding. They've been a tremendous help.
@david994a: Yeah, if you can't work on a project full time (which I assume many on this forum can't) you need little tricks to keep you going, this was mine and it did work ;)
@michaelm: Thanks! The Zen Wars trailer was done by Derek Laufman who took parts of the existing in game art, redrew other parts and then tied it all together. Casey McGuire from Liv Games added the sound, and then I went over it a last time to adjust timings and animate the the "Zen Wars" text at the end of the trailer. All done in After Effects.
@phil_me_up, michaelm:
Do you want the short or the long version? Well this is a dev forum, so you'll get the long version ;). When I started the project in 2009 there was no Game Center, so to add achievements and leaderboards you had the choice of a few really bad frameworks and OpenFeint. Choosing OpenFeint was a no-brainer, they had a great user interface, and the best features. Add 2 years and the playing field has changed. Apple introduced Game Center a while ago. At first it was very basic, but with every OS update they've added more and more features. OpenFeint did something really smart: when Game Center came out they decided to embrace it and support it. You could add OpenFeint and get free Game Center support with it. And their support team is really great, you get concise code level answers to your questions, usually within hours.
But the OF iOS development is falling behind. Apple added retina ages ago, OF still has not updated their gfx. Apple added high res 512x512 achievement pictures, openfeint is still at 50x50 or so. Also OF's attempt to work with Game Center isn't fully polished: your score can appear twice on their leaderboards (as a GC score and as an OF score) and while submitting scores automatically submits your score to any platform the user enabled, querying for scores only queries the openfeint servers, so if the user disables OF suddenly no scores are found, even though I used OF to submit the scores to GC. Now OF is open source, so I theoretically could probably fix both these issues myself. But for reasons I fail to understand the OF team decided to write their code in objective c++ instead of objective c, so adjusting their API is like trying to understand scots: nothing for the faint-hearted (pun intended ;)).
In the end, thanks to the people who created the BCAchievementNotificationCenter and the GameKitHelper the only features that OF offered that I was using and would be lost would be:
- "challenges", where one OF user challenges a second OF user to beat their high score; a feature that my beta testers had not used a single time
- leaderboards and achievements for iOS 3.x, which according to a recent poll I read were down to 6%
- Viewing scores and achievements while offline, which I don't consider a terrible loss for a game where I'm trying to push the multiplayer aspects anyway
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of OF, I think if it weren't for OF then Apple would have never done GC, but I think the OF team is currently concentrating their efforts on the Android platform (who can blame them after Apple hit their business model with a truck) and is letting OF iOS catch rust. I personally think they need to fully embrace GC and become a fully fledged GC wrapper, fully support all GC features the moment they're released, providing underlying structures that Apple does not provide such as caching, and extend the GC feature set beyond what it does already, instead of providing the same functionality in parallel. Until then though, pure GC for me.
I hope that answers your question :D
