Thinking ahead...

UtopianGames

Were thinking about Bumps 2 but due to all the problems with our 1st one not loading, freezing etc on some devices I'm wondering if we make the art to enable retina support (Bumps 1 doesn't have retina support) we would run into loads more problems with users not being able to play.

Has anyone used the retina support and run into problems with GS?

I think GS might be a bad choice for Bumps 2 and we might move away but what do you think?

Darren.

goliath

Well you already know gamesalad very well and it has made you pretty successful that I would say stick with it.

Other reasons are as follows:
By the time you guys release bumps 2 (don't know how quick of a turn around you are going to have) more and more people will have upgraded their devices and will have no issues with your game(I have an iPhone 4 and have no issues whatsoever.

The other thing is that there seems to be a lot of updates headed our way that will fix performance issues so hopefully that will help our future games.

I say stick with what you know and good luck.

As for the retina display, we are toting around with that now so we will let you know what we come up with.

scitunes

I had no problems on my 2nd gen iPod touch. I would stick with what works, and I would say that GS has worked well for you.

Photics

utopiangames said:
what do you think?

I think you're thinking too much. You have to let the market cool down before you launch a sequel. Meanwhile, are you working on an iPad version? Supposedly, improvements to GameSalad are on the way. It's dangerous to make a future plan based on the schedule of Gendai Games, but it seems that the next few updates should be significant. Releasing a sequel to Bumps in the next three months seems too aggressive.

Also, I haven't seen your raw files, but I'm thinking you might have missed some optimization tricks.

design219

I don't think retina display is worth all that much.

Bumps is 14.6 MB right now, if you quadruple the size of the images, you might well run over the ATT 20 MB download limit.

scitunes

i thought it was 20

design219

Yep, thanks sci. Fixed that.

butterbean

I would work on a sequel, but plan on releasing it in a month or so, whilst working on smoothing over the first one's issues.
The iPad is much smoother, and less problematic than programming the same game for the iphone, so you should hopefully have less hiccups if you were to port it over to the iPad, plus, the chance of it getting featured again would be high since it was such a success.

Games that stick in the top 50 are either spending tons of money in advertising a day, have a separate marketing department that works on just keeping it up there, or are just extremely lucky or have been well known since the iphone first came out and created a name/brand for themselves: ie: Moron test and others like it

I think working on an iPad version would be the best thing, and start working on a sequel, and I think it would very likely be featured, then you can cross market your first game as well

expired_012

I would say move on directly to ipad. Trust me, it will be a way bigger hit on ipad and not only that, but you wont have to worry about memory usage, loading times, etc as much as you would for iphone.

Devils

artonskyblue said:
I would say move on directly to ipad. Trust me, it will be a way bigger hit on ipad and not only that, but you wont have to worry about memory usage, loading times, etc as much as you would for iphone.

+1 I agree with artonskyblue you and your team should try to come up with some more updates and maybe release an ipad version. You could even make a huge promotion or something where if the first 50 people download and actually email a copy of the receipt they will receive a free promo code for Bumps 2. Then continue by telling them it will be out for the holidays or something just an idea. I plan to do some type of offer like that with all my apps as soon as I get one in the App Store.

firemaplegames

I hate to see you getting so frustrated with GameSalad.

Those old devices are a pain to develop for, especially with their limited RAM.

Also, Apple won't disclose how much RAM is allocated to each App. It's all guesswork, and it varies tremendously.

You can have your iPhone crammed with music, emails, text messages, apps, etc. Plus now things can run in the background and eat up more RAM. Jailbroken devices can have even more stuff running.

And these devices keep coming out every few months with different specs.

It is refreshing and nice that you care about the end consumers of your game. I also think it is extremely important. But I hate that a some negative reviews are bringing you down so much.

There's only so much you can do as you don't have control over people's devices and what they do with them. People are always going to have problems. Read through the reviews of any of the most popular games and you will see people having the same issues.

I know you tested the game very heavily and didn't notice any of these crashing problems. I guarantee that is much closer to the majority of your user's experiences. Bumps plays nice and smooth on all of my devices.

As time goes on, these devices will keep getting faster and more robust and these issues will hopefully become a thing of the past.

GameSalad also keeps getting better and better with each new release.

If you are still having trouble with your games, I would be more than happy to take a look and see if there are any easy optimizations you could do.

Personally, I hope you make Bumps 2 because I want to play it! I'm sure that goes for your thousands of customers as well.

goliath

Well put firemaple.

UtopianGames

+1 on that and thanks for the offer to look through the game.

Darren.

reddotinc

I would definitely say to use retina gfx.. They look soo good..

People want things to show off their iP4s, and soon enough, retina will be the standard as the amount of iP4s increase.. Without it you will look "old"..

I know you don't have an iP4 yet Darren but when you do, trust me, you will never look back..

// red.

UtopianGames

Yep all future games with have retina support 100%.

And yeah cant w8 to get my iPhone 4

Darren.