Category Archives: My Games

ActionChess available in the App store …and the first update has been submitted

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I just received the approval letter, but I don’t know how long it’ll take to show up in the app store.

I spent all afternoon working on a bug where the up button will occasionally get stuck, ending your game prematurely if you’re not quick enough to pause or hit the physical home button to “unstick” it. I hope the bug is not terrible to play with, but I’ve already submitted the update to apple, and I think the way the up button works now is a significant improvement.

Also in the update is a new menu image. The designer of my chess pieces, Peter Wong, saw the previous menu image and sent me an upscaled version without my even asking! Anyway, hopefully apple won’t take a week to approve the update.

ActionChess 0.1 submitted to Apple!

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I just completed the long and rather arduous task of submitting ActionChess to apple. I think everything went well. The hard part was generating a new development “code signing certificate”, and getting that all hooked into xcode and building the game again using the new certificate. This seemed to go off without a hitch. I guess gathering all the “stuff” necessary for submission was also a chore, particularly the 512×512 pixel “large version” of the icon. Since I was working from tiny icons when I built the icon for the game, scaling it up looked mostly awful. I just have to hope that the only place it’s used is in the game description page in iTunes, where it appears to be scaled down quite a bit.

I also gathered a bunch of screenshots, and took the 5 that I thought were the best to include with the game. I didn’t spend terribly long on that portion, so I don’t know that the screenshots are really all that great. (Read more to see all the ones I chose.)

I also created a new page on this website withe the current game description.

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Anouncing: ActionChess

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The game formerly known as Chesstris is finally nearing completion! ActionChess is a cross between Tetris Attack (Panel de Pon), Tetris, and the classic board game Chess. It turns out to really make your brain work in interesting ways. It will be released for the iPhone sometime in the coming weeks, and if it does really well, I may think about porting a limited version to flash.

Please comment below (or send me an email) if you’d like to put on the ActionChess announce list, where I’ll be letting everyone know when the game finally hits the app store.

go-tetris.com

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Very minor release today (1.1). I just fixed the bug where you couldn’t press “M” when entering your name at the end of the game. (Because it took you to the main menu instead. Oops.)

I also registered Go-Tetris.com, which simply redirects to the game page for now. I’m thinking I’ll probably offload go-tetris onto it’s domain when I get some free cycles. I was going to do this today, but I forgot that I’m using chesstris’s database for the high scores, and I’m not sure if flash will transmit the high scores correctly across domains, so I’ll want to do some testing before I make that plunge.

Pending Versions and Open Development

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Hello Everyone! I’m very close to releasing a new version. I’ve got eyes larger than one space working, but I want to make some progress on the phantom bug I’ve written about earlier before I post this new release.

I’m really just writing to let you all know that I haven’t disappeared completely off the face of the planet. Most of my free time lately has been taken up with wedding preparations. Those are coming along great, but unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of free time for game development.

I’m curious if anyone reading this would be interested in helping with Go Tetris!? I’m considering releasing most of the code as open source, and wonder if there is interest. If that is you, let me know, thanks!

Thanks for your patience!

Bugsville

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Here’s what “alpha” means to me: Not yet “feature complete”. Also, buggy.

I’ve spent nearly all afternoon trying to reproduce the “phantom stones” issue. Stones that appear, after a Living group is removed from the board, hanging in the middle of nowhere. When you try and set something down on them, it’s as if they’re not even there. Great fun.

I did finally reproduce it, and have some small amount of further information, but no idea why it happened in this particular instance and not the dozens of times I had captured living stones in the same game before.

Long story short, if you experience this particular bug, and you think you might know why, or how to reproduce it reliably, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!