I’ve been working on www.thebarbariangame.com for something like 20 months now. I’ve publicly set the release date, weeks ago, for May 8th – was planning on pressing the button at midnight tonight.
I had the game approved multiple times, and would update as I made more improvements or with bug fixes introduced and often fixed by Unity updates (Metal etc, brand new, had issues, is now much better and faster on all iOS devices).
So just two days ago I got “rejected” because the reviewer clicked the “Next: Customize Stats” button. True, I probably should change the text or grey it out once the player is ON that screen, but no one has had any problems with it I’ve seen during testing.
This reviewer, though, kept clicking the link – not realizing I suppose they’re already ON the page. And they didn’t try to customize the stats. When that’s done, the button turns to “Start game”, and then can be clicked again.
I’ve written in to have the review re-looked at, but so far haven’t heard back. If they don’t approve this build, I’ll miss my launch day.
What also sucks is next week I’m showing the game for two days at the Apps World Expo in San Francisco, and it’d be really nice to have the game live and able to be downloaded by people who come by the booth.
Yeah. You could release on Cydia. Most people I know that have iPhones, have jailbroken ones (since it’s as simple as entering special website on Safari). Cydia is mostly like Android market, little to no rules so you would have no problem hitting the store. Anyway, send link to this thread to Apple support, so they can see explanation behind the “bug”, maybe they’ll restore it.
Maybe not a programming bug per se, but it’s a UI bug and should be fixed. You can bet there are users who will do what the reviewer did. I can see that it would be frustrating, but it sounds legit to me, and is good feedback (and it’s kind of impressive the reviewer did more than just load the game and check that it doesn’t immediately crash).
Apple do have a mechanism for you to request an expedited review for situations like this, so I’d definitely hit that up the moment you’ve sent your new build for approval.
For future reference with this kind of thing, you need to make sure you have plenty of review time up your sleeve if you’re working with 3rd parties like this and hard deadlines. Situations like this do occur, and to keep yourself out of trouble you need at least a) time to fix the issue plus b) time to re-submit and go through the review process again. Personally I’d double that just in case they don’t like the solution or find another issue.
They don’t always check exactly the stuff and not always the same depth. Depends on the reviewer and probably depth of queue. Certainly they look for the big stuff, but also user experience to a degree. Something like could easily appear as a hang. They aren’t QA and don’t trouble shoot. I’d be glad they brought it up, better than risk a bunch of negative feedback over a simple thing to correct.
It’s not a programming bug. You choose the player character, and click the “Next: Customize Stats” button at the bottom. That changes the screen to a screen with stats and “-” and “+” by each to customize. There are bonus points you must assign, when those are out, the button change to “Start Game”.
It’s a UI thing – I’ll just grey it out, no biggie. I’ve had a bunch of people play and never saw anyone get confused.
No doubt there will be PLENTY of bugs very shortly. They approved the app with 3 hours 30 minutes before midnight
Grey it out, but also change it to “Start game” as soon as you get to the stats screen. That’s a better indication of the flow, which is probably the heart of the issue in the first place.
Well, the play has to assign the bonus points to their stats, so if I change it early it’ll be equally confusing. I’ll just grey it out, simplest fix in the world.
It’s likely something I would have done if I was designing the screens now – when I did it it was my first real project using the 4.6 UI, so it’s likely got a few issues here and there.
Well I could say something about Cydia too, most people don’t jailbreak and a lot of the ones who do have done it mostly because Cydia + shady extra repos = free apps and games and not cause Cydia has stuff on sale. The rest of jailbreaking possibilities (tweaks or etc.) are just extra for them
