February 14th, 2010
My brother and I have recently done a bunch of work on B.I.T.S. He totally re-puposed all the art assets to look way crisper and in higher resolution. We’re also adding a new feature to the table. Lastly, I’ve done a lot of work to gain some huge performance improvements even with higher res graphics, better PVR texture compression. I’m seeing an almost constant 60 frames per second on my iPhone 3G (not 3GS) with OS 3.1.3. On a first gen device with OS 2.2.1 Im seeing around 40fps.
Most of the performance gains were achieved by eliminating redundant OpenGL ES state changes. An example of this is when binding textures. Instead of constantly switch textures (everything is stored in texture atlases) I store which texture is currently bound and don’t bind if I don’t need to. I also make sure that I put the textures in the atlases in the order in which they are drawn to further minimize texture switching. Another big win was by double the display link update frequency to 1/120. This made the framerate way more consistent. This only works on OS 3.0+. On OS 2.2.1 I’m using a different strategy that was also a big win. I gained at least 10-15 fps by making the rendering thread based instead of being driven by an NSTimer.
Update: Apple just announced that the 3.1.3 update is now free. As soon as my Flurry stats dwindle to < 1% users on OS 2.2.1 I'm going to be more than happy to remove this from my code path!
Here is a screenshot comparison. The old version runs at half the speed (inconsistently) and doesn't look nearly as good. Please note that this is all still in development.
Before:
After:
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December 5th, 2009
We made it through Apple’s review process unscathed. B.I.T.S Pinball Candiballs is up on the App Store. Check out our game’s product page for more details or go directly to the store.
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November 29th, 2009
Hopefully I submitted our holiday version of B.I.T.S Pinball in time to make it onto the App Store for the holidays (23rd of November). We pulled this together in an extremely short amount of time (even shorter if you consider we have a day jobs).
I’m extremely grateful to my wife who somehow found the time and energy for many nights after we put our son to bed to come up with a compelling holiday rendition of B.I.T.S Pinball.
I’ve also created a new website. I’m releasing this as both a paid $.99 version and a free version that has ads (not while playing the game 
). Candiballs!!
Posted in Apple, Cocoa, Fun, Gaming, Objective-C, Programming, Software Development | Comments Off
November 3rd, 2009
Shortly after “B.I.T.S” Pinball’s initial release we ended up on “New and Noteworthy” in the iTunes store and on “Hot New Games” in the iPhone App Store. Of course we have no real way of figuring out where our sales came from but we can only assume our boost in sales had to do with this. Don’t get me wrong, being featured by Apple is definitely great for business! We are extremely excited and thankful for being featured and hope to pull it off again in the future.
Based on these statistics the only observation I can make is that getting Apple’s attention is only part of the equation. I can see traditional marketing making a larger impact on sales over time and the fly by night successes disappearing. Of course this may only apply to us and I’m sure there are stories out there that prove the opposite. I think sharing this info can only help others make more educated guesses on how to play the game
As a side note, the “only” marketing we did was announcing our game on the touchArcade forums (one of the best places to announce your game by far) and requesting reviews from as many iPhone gaming websites as possible. It’s been almost a month since release and not a single review site has reviewed our game (perhaps our game is just that bad?… I don’t thinks so). Those that responded to our review requests where only trying to sell us adverting or wanting us to pay $$$ for an “expedited” review, (except for the iPhoneSlutz: http://iphoneslutz.com/, those ladies are awesome!). It takes a lot to make me nauseous but email responses asking for money to review our game only make me reach for the Pepto.
iTunes link: B.I.T.S Pinball
B.I.T.S Pinball home page: http://www.ballinthesystem.com
Tags: marketing advertising pinball
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October 31st, 2009
I’m really looking forward to attending the iPhone Tech Talk here in Seattle on Monday (Nov 2nd 2009). The scheduled talks look to be really relevant, (http://devworld.apple.com/events/iphone/techtalks/). I might even get a chance to meet up with some Seattle XCoders and maybe even make some new iPhone developer friends. Anyone else going to be there?
Tags: iphone development seattle itouch cocoa objective-c
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B.I.T.S Pinball 
B.I.T.S Pinball Candiballs