oh and you don't need to have achievements button, leaderboards change profile. etc it makes it way to cluttered, a simple agon button in the corner will do just fine. a noticeable one of course maybe like a outline of some sorts that is like blam! and sticks out so you know its there. and for the pause button, it could display a actual menu instead of notification. and could have, Resume, Save, Profile/or Agon, Help, Quit.
I uploaded a new version with the last batch of beta testers added to the provisioning profile. More information in the Never-ending Defending forum. Everyone who provided me with their UDID should be added to this build. I'm afraid I won't be able to add a lot more because my device list is almost filled up and I have to keep a little bit of room for emergencies. Thanks a lot for all comments so far, they are really invaluable for me and the polish of the game. I would however recommend having serious discussions about it in my dedicated forum and certainly not through private messages, because I want all testers to participate in the discussions, and I don't want to clutter the TouchArcade forum with them (although I don't complain about the visibility it brings to my game ). Thanks for the feedback. The choice between Agon and OpenFeint has proven to be a very subjective one between players, and I am still leaving all options open (I can very easily switch between the two as profile backend), but we decided to switch to Agon for various reasons. The most important are: It has support for offline profiles, and OpenFeint still hasn't (although they planned the feature). This is very important because without this support, I have to implement the whole profile thing myself too, synchronize it with the back-end when the player goes online, ... It is just too complex when there are options that do support it. It is a lot more lightweight, although that isn't a big issue because I only use the GUI outside of the actual gameplay. And even Agon is too heavy to open it during gameplay (our game consumes a lot of memory). It has support for cloud blobs, a fancy term for online storage. This means we can store game settings and more importantly game progress alongside the profile highscores and achievents. With this (I haven't implemented it yet, but I will very soon) you can pick up another iPhone, logon with your profile and continue the game right where you left it. The new version of OpenFeint also has this feature, so this is kinda a non-issue now. About the graphics: although I am a professional developer (not games yet, but networked virtual environments which use almost the same techniques), we are by no means professional graphical artists. That is why we need good testers, to steer our artwork towards the "crispy clean" you are talking about. The current graphics are not the final ones, only the characters (the 8 creeps and the three towers) are finished because that are actual photographs. Also the background of the main menu is about finished. So all the rest will be replaced. This doesn't influence gameplay, so I could still start this beta. Thanks for the suggestions, I actually kinda agree with you. We started out with our own profile system and then found out about OpenFeint (mind that we started developing this game more than a year ago), and now switched to Agon. That is the reason all those buttons are on the main menu, but I never thought about the fact that they are not needed anymore. But I don't think every player knows Agon, so just the Agon logo wouldn't be enough. Maybe I could just have one button named "Profile" which opens the Agon UI, so the user can navigate to the different tabs themselves. But then again, will the players know that they can find their highscores and achievements there? The in-game menu will indeed be a real menu which will also have a shortcut to the game settings. For the moment, we can't just open the Agon GUI on top of our game though, because it consumes too much memory. There will be an overview of your current score and achievements though. If a full Agon GUI in-game is requested a lot I can of course implement it using some save-to-and-load-from-disk magic. We decided to only have one auto-save slot for each profile. This means there is no explicit saving and loading of games: the game is automatically saved when the player quits, and there is a way to resume the auto-saved game. Of course, again, if this is a highly-requested feature I can always implement it. I don't think I will do it before our first release though Hope to hear from you all soon! Greetings, JeDi
Social group Hi all, I know this is all confusing to some, but swishinj pointed me out that there is a social group system on this forum, that allows us to have a more private discussion about the beta, inside TouchArcade! I created such a group, and all beta testers should be invited. So we will use that to discuss the beta from now on (I will still be monitoring my forum of course). This is better for you guys because than you don't have to register in yet another forum (and actually only one person did until now ). See you all in the social group! Greetings, JeDi
sorry to sound ignorant, but what is a UDID? I am interested in testing if you're looking for more testers Thanks.
-Plug in your iDevice. -Go to iTunes -Click on your iDevice -Go to summary tab -Click on your device's serial number; -The UDID will appear
it's not really safe to just put the beta out for everyone to download. jailbroken people could play the beta (yes it's possible) and could leak some info you may not want out. otherwise though, i like good TD games, hope this will be as good as i expect!
Thanks for the concern. And you are right of course. I will put a password on the releases tomorrow (and restrict the changelog thread to actual beta testers). Not that the beta is in a nice and playable state already, and I can use all the visibility that I can get Greetz, JeDi
this beta is nearly over and they dont need anymore testers so dont send any pm cause its a waste of time
ye you should of checked the date on the first poct it was like a month and a half ago so they wouldnt still be looking for testers
Yeah, I'm sorry. I only have 5 spots left on my device list, and I really need to save those for emergencies (I can only change the devices once each year). But thanks for the interest!
