We are about 11 days from the 1 year anniversary of Propaganda Lander! We know that several thousand people have played the game and hopefully most of them have enjoyed it! We’ve read every review on the App Store and scoured the web for commentary on the game so if you’re talking about us, we’ve tried to learn from it.

While we don’t have anything planned for this 1 year anniversary, we do have some pretty significant updates on the horizon. We won’t be able to have it in time for April 30th–if only we were keeping an eye on this anniversary thing at the beginning of the year!–but, we’re working as fast as we can do get it done. We refer to it as Propaganda Lander 1.5. The story hasn’t changed but, it’ll be an entirely new experience for those who have already beat the game and hopefully more enjoyable for those who’ve gotten stuck on one of the levels.

Propaganda Landers takes some patience and dedication to get through. It’s a great experience if  you’re willing to make that investment and we love all of you who have but, we’d like to share the experience with more folks. This upcoming update will significantly change the game as you see it on the App Store. You’ll still fly a space ship, land it, pick up guys, and deliver them so we aren’t changing the core mechanic. We still feel that Propaganda Lander has one of–if not the–best flying mechanics on the App Store.

We’re adding more polish, refining the levels, and generally doing the things that we would have done if we had more time a year ago. There’s more new things brewing here at SMASHWORX that we can’t share yet so stay tuned!

Lander-style games have been a long standing tradition in video games ever since Lunar Lander pioneered the sub-genre. There hasn’t been another lander game as iconic since 1969. While the concept is simple, executing it well is deceivingly complex. The mobile games revolution brought about by Apple’s App Store would not be complete without it’s own set of modern lander-style games.

For purposes of full disclosure–if it was’t already obvious–we are the game studio behind one of the games on this list: Propaganda Lander. There aren’t any conflicts of interest here as there really is no other game quite like Propaganda Lander available for the iPhone. After having played virtually every lander-style game on the App Store–certainly the most popular ones–I can confidently say that Propaganda Lander stands alone. That isn’t to say there aren’t other good lander games available as well. There are and that’s why we were able to make this list.

Every game on this list is worth their price tag and most are free or have a free version for you to try. I’ve forked over the money to try all these games so you don’t have to! Each best lander game belongs to a different category: adventure, puzzle, simulation, Lunar Lander remade, and Lunar Lander reimagined. These 5 were whittled down from an original list of 15 candidates so the competition was fairly tough.

Let’s kick this off with the Best Adventure Lander:

Best Adventure Lander

Propaganda Lander is a lander game unlike any other on this list or any other on the App Store. Propaganda Lander features five different worlds with different obstacles on each planet plus one of the most epic boss battles of any App Store game. Along with all the gameplay and action is a heartwarming story of David versus Goliath told through a series of animatics featuring a hilarious and professionally-voiced script. Once you’ve heard the things that the key villan, known as The Rickster, says, you’ll never forget them. You might even find yourself repeating some of them!

I realize that all this praise for Propaganda Lander coming from the people who developed it is going to have a little bias so I’ll quote from a review by AppSpy:

“Propaganda Lander isn’t the only Lander style game available for the App Store, but almost none can claim as much charm and style as ‘The Rickster’ on his universal campaign of glory.” -Andrew Nesvadba, AppSpy (4 out of 5)

By all means, read some of the reviews on the App Store itself and check out this thread from Touch Arcade. We’re proud of our game and we’re not afraid to show it! It is the most expensive game on this list at $4.99 but, this is an experience you cannot supplement with any other app on the store. Get it here.

Best Puzzle Lander

Gravity Lander is another lander game unlike any other. It is really a puzzle game that borrows lightly from the idea of landing a spaceship. The game comes with 52 missions and has a pleasing aesthetic look. Personally, I got stuck at level 45 and had a fun time getting there–I am still unsure of how anyone can pass level 45. The objective of each level is to get your lander from one part of the level to the landing zone by removing various obstacles, tilting the phone, and using a limited supply of thrusts.

If you like puzzle games, this is probably a much overlooked one. It is also free so there’s little commitment. It won’t hurt you to try it. I had a great time playing it. Get it here.

Best Simulation Lander

Lunar Module 3D is less a game and more a simulation of landing an actual lander. This game is done in 3D so you have free range of motion in 3D space. The object is to simply land your lander on the landing zones. I’m personally not a fan of realistic simulations but, for those who are this may be the best one available.

The controls felt good to me and is probably a good fit for fans of the original Lunar Lander who want to play it in a 3D world. The ability to swing not just left and right but in, out, and every other direction adds a new level of challenge to steering a lander. The game is $.99 and I’d only recommend it to people who are interested in more realism and less game. Get it here.

Best Lunar Lander Remake

Touch Lander is basically an exact remake of Lunar Lander. It is difficult like the original and uses vector style graphics like the original. The changes would be the use of the accelerometer to steer the lander and touching the screen for thrust. This is not a game for the light or heart much like the original.

Much like how the original arcade Lunar Lander was a coin robber and did little to comfort those without soft hands, this one is pretty much the same. The game costs $.99 and is as accurate a version of the original as you’ll find on the App Store. Get it here.

Best Lunar Lander Reimagining

Retro-X is like Touch Lander with a little modernization. While the art style could use improvements, it does employ 3D rendered environments so the game is possibly done in 3D but you can only move in 2D like class lander games. Retro-X is much more forgiving than the original Lunar Lander and uses scrolling levels. It employs the same accelerometer and touch screen system as Touch Lander.

Retro-X shares some gameplay similarities with Propaganda Lander in that you pick up little guys where you land and bring them back up to the mothership. Retro-X is available for free so there’s no harm in giving it a try. Get it here.

In more SDK 4.0 learnings, we came across a file size problem with Propaganda Lander in moving to SDK 4. The Unix Executable File became twice as big as it used to be under the 3.0 SDKs. There was no rhyme or reason for this that we could see.

If you are someone who cares about keeping your app’s file size under the 3G download limit, it is important to optimize as best as you can do get it under 20MB. A lot of games really don’t care which will be an annoyance to someone who wants to buy the game but has no WiFi service nearby. Other games just can’t be that small and then there’s nothing you can do about it.

We are pretty adamant about keeping Propaganda Lander under 20MB. Even with all our wondrous musical tunes, movies with voice overs, and pretty graphics we demand to have a game that can be downloaded from anywhere there is a 3G signal. After all, we are making a game for a mobile phone first and a portable music device second.

The reason why the executable file was twice as big under SDK 4 was because it defaults to compiling for iPad as well as iPhone. I see no reason to have both binaries when most games have specific versions for iPhone and iPad. You can fix this by checking Build Active Architecture Only in the project settings.

You should enable Dead Code Stripping as well–it usually is by default. There’s also Optimization Level which defaults to [-Os] for fastest, smallest and tends to be best.

I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS the day it was available. It runs great and the new features are extremely useful. I’ve turned my 10 pages of apps into 3 pages using folders! I’ve been–as well as many others–waiting for multitasking for apps like Pandora and it’s finally here! I am now waiting for Rhapsody to provide an update with multitasking.

As is with every iPhone OS update, I need to install the new SDK to actually do any work. The update to iPhone SDK 4.0 wasn’t without a few hiccups! We are almost done with the rather hefty Propaganda Lander update and it will run just fine on iOS 4.

iPhone SDK 4.0 assumes every app that you develop will utilize multitasking. As of now, we don’t find much use for multitasking in our games. Propaganda Lander won’t have multitasking. When you close it, it will clear itself out of memory and won’t sit there hogging system resources.

While playing around with the new SDK, I have seen Propaganda Lander operate in the background. I’ve switched from Propaganda Lander to Safari and back. It’s kinda cool. Although, using any other resource intensive application will cause iOS to shut down Propaganda Lander anyway so it’s not particularly useful in that sense.

Implementing Multitasking

I had some difficulty trying to figure out how to opt out of multitasking! I followed the instructions Apple provides in their manual but, it just didn’t work–it had mostly to do with my shallow understanding of Xcode. Developers switching to iPhone SDK 4.0 will realize that their games will have an error upon exiting because it assumes the app is going to run in the background and you haven’t handled for it.

You can either handle for it using these two functions:

- (void)applicationDidEnterBackground:(UIApplication *)application
{
      [glView stopAnimation];
}

- (void)applicationWillEnterForeground:(UIApplication *)application
{
      [glView startAnimation];
}

They should reside in your AppDelegate and in this case we are stopping our animations when the app enters the background and restarts our drawing when the app enters the foreground. You are not allowed to make any GL calls while in the background.

That’s a quick way to implement background support although there are lot of other things that you need to account for depending on what your app is doing. Apple has a guide for that.

Opting Out

The other alternative is to simply opt out of running in the background. Apple has a guide for that as well but, it’s not exactly as they describe! Maybe I’m just not as Mac-savy–and I’m not–but, I followed their instructions and added the key/value pair to Propaganda Lander’s Info.plist and nothing happened.

With a little help from Nik–a Mac veteran if you will–we figured out that you can’t simply write YES as a string in the key/value pair. You need to right click in the value box and change the Value Type to a Boolean. This is seemingly obvious except I didn’t know you could do that. I’m from PC-land and we don’t use plists.

So if you are like me and can’t seem to figure out why Apple’s instructions aren’t working, this is what you need to do. It is also possible that I’m the only person developing for iPhone that didn’t know that in which case, hope you had a good laugh!

Hello friends! Jess here with an update on two new modes for Propaganda Lander: Remix: Survival and Easy Mode.

Remix: Survival is a sensory assault of epic proportions. Players will attempt to survive as long as possible while we throw every nasty enemy known in Rickster’s Universe at them. In order to create this new mode, Tommy has had to re-haul our level editor to offer even more customization. We can now control waves of different enemy types through timing, random amperage ranges and frequency. Therefore, I’ve spent the last couple of days tweaking and testing to create an hyperactive experience. The types of issues I’ve run into mainly deal with offering an experience that has peaks and valleys instead of an experience that amps up only to plateau. What we’ve decided is to offer a sort of three steps forward, one step back mechanic that allows the player to feel like they’ve accomplished a great feat for surviving a particularly hard wave and to facilitate an innate feeling of tension and drama. Also, one other issue I’ve had to deal with is beating Tommy’s high score, but that’s more of a personal policy. The last bits that we have to deal with is optimization for all devices and implementing the soundtrack.

For all you folks that find the Lander to be a little too punishing, we’ve started on an Easy Mode. Easy Mode is exactly what it sounds like, fewer enemies, more power-ups, and less damage make it easier for the casual player to really enjoy Propaganda Lander. I’d have to say that the most difficult part of creating Easy Mode has been striking a balance between making things easier but still retain the challenge. I tend to make levels pretty difficult, look at hardcore mode for example, and it’s been a practice in self-control to really loosen things up a little. We still need to do some testing before we release Easy Mode but I think it’s totally worth it to invite casual gamers into the fold.