Hey All! I'm currently (slowly) teaching myself to program in the hopes of building iphone games one day. I'm also freelancing doing marketing for a few development shops and other game-related companies, and I have a quick question: If you were to change an 'icon' or some 'artwork' inside an iphone game, would the end-user have to download a patch or update on their phone to see it, or could they simply restart the application? ie: if Angry Birds made one of the birds a turkey for Thanksgiving, or a Reign Deer for Christmas? Hope this makes sense! Thanks!
It all depends. If you had a character within your game where the image that represented it was pulled from a web server, sure. Although this could give you a way to update content without relying on Apple's approval process, you do have some possible pitfalls: No or slow network speeds The user won't know if an update is available since it's bypassing the App Store Requirement of a server May miss out on press when a new update is avail. on the App Store And I'm sure there are others. I'm not saying this is a bad approach, I'm just brining to light some issues you may encounter. Also, the actual game's icon isn't one of the graphics that can be changed remotely.
Thank you so much that really helps! Your last comment confused me a bit, what do you mean by the main game icon? I'm just talking about changing backgrounds, potential objects or pieces, to something holiday themed or something like that.
Another thing to note is that with iOS 5 Apple is bringing patch updates, where people wont have to download your WHOLE game all over again when you do updates. The simple download a patch to update say version 1 to version 2.
