benbritten.com

Hey All!

I am going to be in San Francisco in just a few days for GDC 2010. If you are going to the conference and you want to meet up, let me know. I will be giving a few talks at the Unity3d theatre about uniTUIO and Sandor and I will be showing off Sandor's 'FishTisch' (fish table) which is his big multi-touch setup (also in the Unity booth) so come by and say howdee!!

In the next few days (or maybe next week, during GDC) I will put up some new uniTUIO scripts that make it quick and easy to port over your Unity3d iPhone games to the Unity Desktop and make use of TUIO for your multi-touch controls!

Cheers!
-B

It has been a very busy few months.

I started on "Mole - The Quest for the Terracore Gem" last october. Chris (the designer) and I worked hard on a prototype that we got out in about three weeks. We submitted that to the Muse games contest as well as the GDAA indie game contest at GCAP 2009.

Originally we were slated to do an iPhone release in mid December 2009, but since we got picked as a finalist for the GDAA Indie game contest, we decided to focus on polishing a desktop version that we could show off at the conference. This paid off huge in terms of really good gameplay additions as well as some invaluable data collected watching people play the game at GCAP. We took all of that information and updated the gameplay to make it even better and also spent a few weeks getting it running on the iPhone. After a good bit of external beta in mid January, we released it to the app store in early Feb.

Unfortunately somewhere in the final frenzy to get the game out the door one of the meta data files got overwritten with an older version. We built that into the version 1.0 release and pushed it to the store.

UNfortunately that little thing caused the game to go looking for some resources that no longer existed at the end of a level and was causing crashes. I hate crashes. As soon as we found out about the crashing bug we pulled the app from the store and pushed up a fixed binary. We had some great help from some of the touch arcade forum regulars who notified us of the bug right away, so thanks to them we were able to pull it so quickly and get the fix out straight away!

Although the initial app was approved in about 2 days, the fix took about a week to get through the process (still way faster than last year, so: yay Apple!).

In any case, Mole is out now, and we have had a great response to it.

Just a few weeks after I started dev on Mole, I was approached by Tin Man Games to take over the Gamebook Adventure development.

This turned out to be a much larger job than I had originally anticipated and it took about a month longer than we had hoped. However, the final product is really great. The time we spent to make sure the game was polished and performed well really paid off. There are a few bugs in this first release and we are working on a fix for them right now.
We have had some good press coverage for GA:

PocketGamer UK review
TouchArcade Review

Next up! We are looking to finish a handful smaller more casual titles that we have had in production for awhile now, SkateDude and BMXDude are at the top of this list as well as a couple new games called 'Steam Pilot' and 'Gooey' that I will post about later.

Cheers!
-Ben

Oops. In my haste to fix up the Snow Leopard issues in xTouch i neglected to notice that I had not included the OpenCV framework as part of the package. Thanks to Martin Kaltenbrunner from TUIO.org for finding that little omission.

If you already had OpenCV installed (as many of us do) then you probably would not have noticed, but it is kinda nice to have it all in one package when installing on new machines and stuff like that.

Anyhow, I update the link in the earlier post, and here it is again if you want the binary:

xTouchV1.01.zip

This seemed to work on my Snow Leopard laptop that did not already have openCV on it, so hopefully it will work for other people as well :-)

Cheers!
-B

And let me know if anyone finds anymore bugs :-)

Hey All!

Sorry this has taken so long. I had it sitting in my to-do pile forever. And I had figured out the problem, just not fixed it.

Thanks to Morgan at bluecrash.com for sending me an email to kick me in the ass and spend the ten minutes to fix it.

Anyhow,

If you are wondering what the problem was it was that I had forgotten to lock the CVPixelBaseAddress before trying to access the CV frame pixel data. (when grabbing frames off the QTCapture frame buffer)

On Leopard this worked fine (for some reason) but was wrong. Here is the proper way to go about it:

 
// Lock the base addy for the pixels
// or it will return nil
CVPixelBufferLockBaseAddress(videoFrame,0);
unsigned char * srcBytes = CVPixelBufferGetBaseAddress(videoFrame);
.
.
.
// dont forget to unlock it when you are done
CVPixelBufferUnlockBaseAddress(videoFrame,0);
 

And that seemed to be the problem on snow leopard. I know, lame and easy. So again my apologies for not just getting it done sooner.

Also, I do plan to release the code for xTouch, but it needs a refactor and a clean first, so that will have to wait. You can get the binary (works on leopard and snow leopard) here:

xTouch.zip

Cheers!
-B

Excellent! would love to have you!

Here is what I need:
Your device ID
An email address that works
Your name
The game you want to beta test for (I usually have more than one going at a time)

the last three should be easy, I don't even care if it is your real name. But the email has gotta work, or you will never get the links to the binaries.

As for the Device ID here is how you find that:

Launch iTunes.
Connect your device to your computer.
Select the device in the Devices list.
In the Summary pane, click the Serial Number label. It changes to Identifier.
Choose Edit > Copy.
Paste your Device ID into an email.
Be sure to include your name and device name in the email.
Sent that email to me, here: support@benbritten.com.

Please make the subject something like: "beta tester for Mole" or "beta tester for gamebooks" or whatever it is that you might want to be beta testing. Alternatively, subject lines like: "Ben, you are total awsomesauce" work as well.

Usually the beta builds come out every few days or so. You probably will get something back form me in a day or two and then you will get added to the big list I use to send out beta build notices.

Once you do get a build, you will need both the game binary and the provisioning profile.

Installing

You should have two files downloaded: whateverGame.app and the most recent AdHoc.mobileprovision file. (these are generally delivered together in a zipped bundle)

Unzip the bundle if you haven't already.

Open iTunes and drag the app and provision files onto the "Applications" item in the upper-left section of the sidebar named "Library". (It won't import if you drop it on the Playlists section. If the "Library" heading highlights when you drag them in, you've got the right place.) Give iTunes a few seconds to copy and process the app.
Plug-in your iPhone/iPod Touch and sync. (If you manually manage your installed applications, be sure to check the box next to the game in the Applications tab before syncing.)
If you get an error when syncing, make sure you have the newest .mobileprovision file downloaded. Copy it into your iTunes library and sync again.
Disconnect when the sync completes and fire it up!

Upgrading from a Previous Beta Version

(This is a weird process -- sorry.)
Download the newest version of the app and provisioning profile.
Unzip the app and drag the files into the Library section in the sidebar of your iTunes.
iTunes will copy app file, saying 'Processing: Snowferno.app'
Click "Replace" when told 'The application "Snowferno" already exists in your iTunes library....'.

Don't sync quite yet -- The weird part starts here:
On your device, in the home screen, tap and hold the game app icon for 2 seconds until the apps jiggle.
Tap the X to delete the game app, and tap "Delete" when prompted 'Deleting "The Game" will also delete all of its data.'

(Sorry, for now this is all part of the process. Some of our games store your progress on the server, in which case you wont actually lose anything, others dont, so you will)

Click the Home button to exit jiggle-mode.

Back in iTunes, *now* do a sync. IMPORTANT: if you manually manage your installed applications, you must visit your Applications tab before syncing and re-check the checkbox for the game. Deleting an app automatically unchecks that app's checkbox so you have to recheck it each time.
Now sync.

Sorry about that. Due to the way Unity is compiled into xcode, iTunes unfortunately doesn't recognize new versions of apps until they are official and acquired through the App Store. (or if someone can tell me how to force it to use the new one, then let me know!) For beta testing, this means we have to have you jump thru these hoops and delete and install fresh copies of the app each time.

Cheers!
-Ben