Our latest title is available on iTunes. It took one week to get it approved, and that included the entire time iTunesConnect was closed down! Anyway, here’s the info on the game:

Story:

The economic recession of 2008 was not the result of Wall Street leverage and the housing bubble. It was in fact a deliberate and highly complex plan conceived by a clandestine organization and carried out thought the fluid channels of greed so pervasive in Americaís financial sector.

Through a grass roots investigation led by Nick Hammer and a team of net-hacks, this complicated plot was uncovered. It was determined that Sun Valley Bank, of Bells, Montana, was the nexus of this conspiracy.

Your mission is to attack the headquarters of this insidious plot and destroy the new inhabitants before they escape to waiting pods. This will not be easy, but with my special flying car named “Sally”, unique weapons, full 3D gameplay, and thumbsteering, anything is possible.

Do you have what it takes to restore economic stability as we know it today?

Good luck and God speed!

Features:

• Completely integrated storyline.
• Advanced graphics engine designed to take advantage of the power of Apple’s mobile devices.
• Full 3D assets and effects.
• Intense and fast-paced gameplay.
• Multiple weapons
• In-game instructions.
• Music and sound effects included.

Get it now on the iTunes App Store!

I just had my first title submission rejection from the App Store. The reason given? The small bundle icon does not match your large icon.

OK, so at first I was pretty irate, they both contain the same elements and it seemed pretty obvious. But after cooling down, I have to admit that objectively it is possible some customers would be confused … I still think the reviewer is being pretty nit-picky here, but I also know that end users can be very easily confused.

What do you think?

Fortress Luna App icon

Original Fortress Luna App Store image

We’re going to redo the app store image to match the icon, since the original image has too much detail to be reduced to an icon.

Conclusion: While it might seem that you only need a passing resemblance between the two, if you don’t want your app rejected over a trivial matter, take my advice and make sure there is no way someone can’t tell that the two images refer to the same app!

So there I was, up for nearly a day straight and have figured out the certificate issue that was preventing my program from running on my iPhone after upgrading to SDK 3.0 beta 5.

On the device I was getting this error: CAContextInvalidLayer - CALayer already attached to a context while on the simulator I was getting this error: setFence:count: called more than once per transaction. Cryptic messages that googling for solutions found no answers to.

After many hours of investigation and trial and error, I checked out older revisions of my code base (gotta love svn, or any revision control system for that matter!) until I arrived at a build that installed and ran on the device. From there I started doing file by file compares with the next version (which didn’t install) looking for anything that might be the cause.

Finding nothing obvious, I started implementing each change one by one. The difference between the revisions were minor and few in count (as any good checkin should be) so this didn’t take long… and I arrived at a solution!

My application was using several layers to create visual effects. At one point I made a “change that will make no difference”, and so minor I kept ignoring it in my code reviews! However, this code was the cause of all of my issues… but only long after the actual code had been run.

The problem came down to how I created my layers. I had started out very basic, but then thought it would be better to make a copy of the first layer so I could inherit more of it’s properties. However, this code:

targetLayer = [[CALayer layer] initWithLayer:self.layer];

copied too much information and when I later tried to work with the layers I ran into the “already attached” problem. The correct way to create layers for my program (and what I started out with) is:
targetLayer = [CALayer layer];

Reverting that one change in my latest code base let me get back to making progress. Hopefully documenting my error here will save someone else a few minutes or hours if they run into the same issue.