JohnnyWorks

After a long time in development, the sequel to one of the top iPhone games is finally ready for release.

StickWars 2 has all the gloriously simple gameplay that made the original game so addictive, but adds a vast amount of new levels, spells, enemies, and other content. There is now helpful screens to guide a player how to use the more advanced features of the games, as well as a bit of a storyline for the campaign.

I can say much more about it, but I’d rather you check it out yourself on the AppStore. The game is $0.99, same price as the original, and like the original will receive updates in the coming weeks to flesh out the content, balance, and spells in response to player feedback.

The title pretty much explains it all…StickWars (the full version) is the current FAAD main feature, meaning if you always wanted to upgrade to the full version but couldn’t afford the massive $0.99, now is your chance.

With the full version, you get unlimited levels, two free Unlimited Challenge games, can Challenge OpenFeint friends to beat your score with push notifications and get online high score rankings.

Get it FREE here in the iTunes App Store!

Also join our new official Facebook page for news and updates!

StickWars was featured on Apple’s list of best games of 2009 and the list of best selling apps of 2009. Each of the lists features 30 apps each and are very well promoted within iTunes. I have no idea why they would chose to feature it twice on somewhat similar lists, but I can imagine it has to do something with the ~3 month delay getting my last update approved. While this is nothing but a guess, if true then it’s fantastic of Apple to take that into account. Or maybe they just really like playing StickWars…

Between the new visibility from being featured as well as what I imagine to be  a lot of word of mouth promotion during the holiday season as people open their new iPod Touches, sales have jumped up and StickWars has risen up the lists. It is now the top 40 paid app in the US, and it is actually back on the top grossing list at 99. For anybody who doesn’t know, the spike in sales of apps during Christmas holiday is like a big fat Christmas bonus to iPhone developers, and it’s a great feeling getting this final push before headed into the new year.

I meant to make a long post detailing my frustrating experience trying to get version 1.7 of StickWars approved for over 3 months, but I’ll sum it up by saying Apple had some unexpected technical problems with their approval process, they worked on it for a while, fixed the issues, and called me personally to help StickWars through the approval process once the issues were fixed. While it was very frustrating to develop a big release (including all those new challenge mini-games available as an in-app purchase) and then have to sit on it as StickWars slipped down the charts for 3 months, Apple has done what they can to make the process quicker and less painful, and being featured prominently twice by them is a unexpected gift that really helps me let go of my anger over the previous delay .

Slime Ball has completed its first cycle of rising up and then falling back down the charts. Both the free and the paid version are now of the top 100 lists, although we have some fun updates planned that will hopefully breath some life back into them. It’s time to go hit up the keyboard and get back to work…

I’m pleased to announce that StickWars Ultimate Challenge is live on the AppStore. It is a collection of mini-games based on the addictive StickWars gameplay, and allows you to directly challenge your OpenFeint friends to compete for the top scores.

You can read more about it here, or just click here to visit the iTunes page.

I have been working on this update for months, and while it was originally slated to be an in-app purchase included with StickWars, technical limitations imposed by Apple dictated  that I release it as a completely separate app. You can try out two of these minigames for free in StickWars or StickWars Lite version 1.7. Have fun, and as always I welcome all feedback, so visit my forums and let me know what you think.

After nearly a month of delay, StickWars 1.5 is live with important bug fixes and a few new features, including a few achievements. Luckily I’m all ready to push out v1.6 which includes a new boss enemy, the giant stick figure. I also added a lot of small fun features, so as the ability to throw and slam stick figures into one another to kill them. You can also now kill the more powerful enemies by slamming many small stick figures into them. I think this adds yet another way for talented players to save money and reach higher levels and scores .

In addition, I’ve re-written parts of the code for the basic functions behind levels and sound, and somehow I managed to fix a bug that I didn’t know existed. The game no longer crashes sometimes when you attempt to load a new level–the bug before was due to my background sound engine, except none of my debugging tools had located it there. Basically the last crash bug has been fixed, and since I’ve been adding features to this version for the past week I have not seen it crash once. I’m really proud of the stability of the game now.

There is a new loading screen that I’m particularly proud of–it allows me to include short hints that answer the most common questions I get from users based on reviews, emails, and forum posts. It’s a lot nicer to be able to read a short hint while you are waiting 3-6 seconds for the level to load, and maybe help out your gameplay, rather then just looking at the word ‘loading’ over your current screen. I can also throw in a few words about upcoming versions, such as my brief request for feedback about charging in game $0.99 for the new multi-player challenges coming in the next version. I’d love to get some player feedback on this–I feel most people are happy paying only $0.99 for StickWars, and I don’t want to raise the price for the same basic game (campaign mode), but these multi-player challenges are a whole new ballpark that I feel deserves another $0.99. However, I’m willing to listen to my users who feel strongly enough about this to contact me. I will be providing a few of the challenges free so a player can test them out.

The bad news is StickWars has fallen off the top 10 for the first time since it first rose up there in April. But sitting at #11, I’m hoping these new features and fixes will bring new life back to the game and drive more players to it.

One of the many articles is up at marketwire.com. Here is my blurb:

Eric Hartzog, StickWars: “StickWars will include a new gameplay mode that will allow a player to battle for a limited period of time and challenge his friends for top scores. His friends will be notified of the challenge through push notifications, powered by OpenFeint, and they will be able to easily load StickWars and respond to the challenge. These challenges will flow back and forth in near real-time, and be easily visible to players even if StickWars is not currently loaded.

A single-player game inevitably has a limited amount of engagement — developers can only add so much content to a game. But by drawing from existing social networks and encouraging social competition between gamers, the players themselves create new tasks for one another and new obstacles to overcome. This user-generated content expands the value of any game far beyond what was initially put into it, and continues to expand as the popularity of the game increases even further.”

You can read more details about exactly what this means for StickWars in this forum post. There are a lot of new features and brand new game modes coming to StickWars. These new features will require a small purchase in game, but give access to many social features that allow you to compete against your friends in many different challenges.

Expect these features ready at the start of July, and for them to be live anywhere between 1-4 weeks after that when Apple approves it.

Lacking a better medium to communicate to all my users how difficult Apple is making it to provide them with the level of service I’d want to,  I’ll get my rant out here on my blog where it’s safe.

I had a bugfix version of StickWars ready the same day the buggy version 1.4 was released. That day was May 27th. Is is June 18th and I’m still waiting patiently for Apple take a look at the update. It has been two weeks since I submitted a corrected update, and I haven’t got a lick of feedback back. In the mean time, my app has dropped from #3 to #9, and my users are sitting there wondering what I’m doing when in fact I have two more full-content updates ready for release, completed in the time it took Apple to approve a bugfix release. Keep in mind that my app has been in the top 10 paid apps for months now–this is one of Apple’s moneymaking apps. I would think they would want to work quickly to approve an update which would improve the game experience for hundreds of thousands of players.

Now I am not absolving myself of the responsibility of releasing a version with some problems. The fault for that lies solely on me, and was due to a somewhat chaotic situation as I was moving homes and starting a new full-time job that led to me not having as much time as I expected to test the release. This is no excuse, however, as I should have just rejected the update and resubmitted later after more testing. But the problem was magnified greatly by the simple fact that Apple has no agreement or desire to protect the ability of developers to have control over the applications they are producing. We can’t respond directly to user complaints or support requests posted on the AppStore. Most importantly, our update schedule is 100% subject to the whims and scheduling of Apple, so an update that we kill ourselves to complete on a rapid basis could be live in 3 days, or in 30. And we never know what to expect until after the fact.

Before a couple weeks ago when Apple first started emailing me to let me know that they approved my update, do you know how I would find out my update was live? My as-it-happens google alert would send me an email that a new cracked version of StickWars was available on some blog somewhere. I also rely 100% on third-party tools to tell me how people are responding to my applications. Check out www.appfigures.com to see what I’m talking about–from that site, you can read reviews from all countries. I received a lot of valueable feedback reading through the reviews of other english-speaking nations. Apple provides no way (that I know of) for developers to see the status of their application in the AppStore (if it is featured anywhere, it’s rank in other countries, etc…).

In addition, I’ve only received two of the seven payments for April 2009 that I should have been paid by now. Granted, one of those received was from the US, and therefore was the largest one, but they are sitting there wasting interest on a lot money and I still have not recieved a single response as to why. Three weeks ago I dug through their contact form and sent a polite email asking them why I got the financial report for a few thousands but never received the deposit, but I have yet to receive even as much as an automated reply confirming receipt of my message. I have sent more inquries weekly, and just started sending them to a more broad range of email address, and will update this at some point when I get a response.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple has done an amazing job with the AppStore, and building a system like this from scratch is bound to be difficult, with problems like this sprouting up and slowly being fixed month by month. But right now, I seem to find myself trapped at a criticial point, where if another week goes by without Apple looking at my update and StickWars drops off the top 10, and then the many more features and improvements I’ve made in the meantime won’t matter as all the exposure in the AppStore revolves around the top 10 and top 100 lists. I understand that applications have a limited shelf life at the top of the lists, but I didn’t expect mine to be cut short at the end by random and unpredictable update approval practices by the iTunes Store.

I believe that complaining without recommending a course of action to fix the problem is a waste of words, so here are some ideas that I would love to see put into the AppStore.

• A priority queue for update approval based on popularity. The apps that are getting constant updates pushed out to hundreds of thousands of players should have more personal attention from Apple staffers. On the other hand, it should be balanced so that even an unpopular app which has gone two weeks with an update in the queue is bumped up to the top priority.
• A developer portal into iTunes Store “Insights” that gives you access to any information related to the status of your applications, including reviews and rankings (in all categories) from all nations, along with any places where the application is featured.
• More analytic information, so I can see how many users download my Lite version first, and then download the Paid version.
• Allow developers to post short ‘responses’ to user reviews. This way, when somebody complains “the game was too easy wish i could make it harder!!@#” a developer who cares can go through and add a response such as “just hit the options button and set the difficulty to hard” (real example).

Update: I did eventually get paid by Apple like 1 or 2 months late, and about 2 weeks after I got paid I got responses to my multiple emails (sent over a month before) saying “we show your account as paid in full…”. To be fair to Apple, my banking situation was a little complex and I understand that it takes time to go through all that, but I would have appreciated a brief response (or even an automated confirmation) to my inquiries long before almost 2 months have gone by.

After getting a somewhat unexpected call last night from the OpenFeint group and after a long discussion, I’ve decided to dive head-on into adding new gameplay modes to StickWars that I previously considered but had put off implementing. These new modes will use the social networks and friends managed in-game by OpenFeint. When the framework is ready at the start of July, StickWars will use push notifications powered by OpenFeint to allow players to issue near real-time challenges to one another. It’s going to be crazy fun .

Press releases are below:

finance.yahoo.com
marketwire.com
marketwatch.com

I’m really torn up over the incredibly long delay in Apple approving the 1.5 update. The bug fixes are sorely needed, yet Apple felt it necessary to first reject it over minor UI issues, and then drag their feet in getting around to look at it again. I’m really hoping it will be approved tonight or tomorrow.

In better news, I found StickWars on the 4th page of the ‘Staff Favorites’, so it appears the Apple staff at least still enjoys playing the (buggy) version . However, StickWars has dropped to the #5 paid spot as other games have had their updates roll out while StickWars stands stagnant. I’m still hopeful, though, and am really looking forward to the features that are coming out soon.

I get emails from people asking me ‘when does the game end?’ and ‘how do I beat it’ and finally I will be able to respond with something other than ‘it doesn’t’ and ‘you can’t. The social network integration along with achievements will allow you to battle out with you friends who is the ultimate StickWars master. I’ve noticed that there is actually a wide range of skill level of the different people playing StickWars, with some people getting stuck at level 25 and others reaching 100+. I can’t wait until people get the chance to compete with their friends.

I’m also working on the most-asked-about enemy that everyone seens to want: the giant stick figure featured on the icon of the game. He will be a ‘boss’ enemy, and it will be a very different experience fighting him than any of the current enemies. Look forward to the future updates to StickWars .

In case you haven’t noticed it so far, StickWars v1.4 contained some unfortunate bugs that makes the game difficult to play at certain points. This is partially due to me moving my house, moving over to a new forum system (had trouble notifying beta testers), all at the same time. Basically the released didn’t get tested as much as it should have, and this was the result. I’ve learned an important lesson here…

Version 1.5 was sent to Apple last week, but was rejected because the message that says “Submitting high score” wasn’t on a text label or something else silly. So we are still just waiting on Apple to approve the latest update.

After like 6 weeks as the #1 paid game in the US, it is now pushed down to #2 by Sims, which is okay considering Sims is a pretty cool game. I still hate the fact that StickWars was overshadowed so long by “The Moron Test”, but this is the AppStore after all.