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.

Hello lovelies! Check out our Fresh Apps page and make us the freshest app in all the land!

http://www.freshapps.com/propaganda-lander/

A smattering of level gameplay from Propaganda Lander. Stunts performed by Tommy.