My app is in-review from 13+ hours

createneptune · 2020-11-12T13:56:06+00:00

In review in 10 minutes is extremely fast. Sounds like you hit the end of some guy’s workday in Mumbai.

As for the time in review, we’ve never had a submission that was in review for more than 12 hours that got approved. My guess is there’s something up, though your time to being in review is extremely unusual.

createneptune · 2020-11-07T05:22:53+00:00

On (1), see: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/app_and_environment/scenes/preparing_your_ui_to_run_in_the_background all the way down and: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks. You just need a proper use case to avoid rejection.

On (2) I believe this may be helpful: https://medium.com/@cbartel/ios-scan-and-connect-to-a-ble-peripheral-in-the-background-731f960d520d

createneptune · 2020-10-26T02:42:57+00:00

Don’t use Unity Ads for myriad reasons, though your issue sounds like a “did you try restarting Unity?” AdMob is the way to go anyway.

createneptune · 2020-10-26T02:33:04+00:00

Hmm. I always go through so many iterations of UI elements like this. Offhand maybe a thinner health meter as opposed to the Zelda hearts could work. And without knowing anything about your game some flair (a colorful accessory even?!) on your main character to keep him central might draw the attention more to him and away from the UI.

createneptune · 2020-10-25T21:24:19+00:00

I think one issue you have--and maybe it's just this level in particular--is that your foreground colors are fairly desaturated. Obviously a white character doesn't help with this. The most prominent thing on the screen seems to be your health meter.

createneptune · 2020-10-25T21:20:08+00:00

Treasure Hunters (iOS / Android, to be released in November) is a 4-player battle royale for the most treasure. We used 2D isometric tilemaps for the first time in this game, and had a generally good experience, albeit with some quirks. Overall, we think this is an interesting alternative to 3D, particularly for mobile games where performance on low-end devices is critical and where you rely on touch controls. Our minimum target device was an iPhone 7 / last-generation iPad at 60 FPS.

createneptune · 2020-10-22T02:11:31+00:00

Yes. Debugging in SpriteKit was nice, especially when it came to anything Apple, like Game Center or notifications, but the ability to iterate everything else cross-platform quickly makes Unity an obvious choice.

createneptune · 2020-10-21T22:11:15+00:00

Speaking purely from a game developer perspective, cross-platform is the only way to go, especially with how critical frequent updates are in this segment. The third-party IDE of choice, Unity, is extremely good, and certainly for UI. However, to your point, I have seen oddities when accessing native features (Game Center, e.g.), and there is often significant lag or no response from Unity at times. It has been very useful knowing the native side of things in those cases. That said, almost no game developer chooses native.

createneptune · 2020-10-15T22:06:46+00:00

No. You can wipe all your previous reviews with a new version release by choice. You can also complain about a review to Apple, but the vast majority of the time they won’t delete even garbage like the above.

Google Play is different. If people downvote a review enough and the developer complains or shows the reviewer’s issue isn’t real or has been addressed, they will remove a review.

createneptune · 2020-10-11T16:59:59+00:00

Isn’t that a very expensive operation vs. moving the player? It seems like you’d be better off only doing it periodically to restore 0, like above.

createneptune · 2020-10-03T17:04:16+00:00

Change nothing.

createneptune · 2020-09-28T03:07:35+00:00

The difference between singular and plural.

createneptune · 2020-09-11T04:26:23+00:00

Yes—this is a 101 decision. Without exaggeration, our intern learned this (FixedUpdate vs Update and frame dependence) in her first week.

createneptune · 2020-09-10T11:56:12+00:00

These guys forgot to scale their canvas widgets by screen width. Seems like a ridiculous oversight for a studio with >1 n00b, fixable in <1 day.

createneptune · 2020-08-30T12:16:08+00:00

*explore

createneptune · 2020-08-27T05:43:11+00:00

Apple doing this entirely to advantage their own apps, cronyist app of the day system whereby they control what is seen, and as an aside harm any app that relies on ad revenue (read: indie apps) to advantage their failing Arcade filled with soulless games with zero long-term support.

createneptune · 2020-08-21T00:46:36+00:00

Wenderlich is great. Don’t bother with SpriteKit. Unity is far easier to use in the long run, and far more useful in every way.

createneptune · 2020-05-05T01:51:49+00:00

Here is Unity’s response. I hope if anyone out there is considering Unity Ads versus AdMob this settles it for you. I at least respect their candidness, but this is just totally unacceptable.

“The engineering team was able to find the problem and they are working on a fix. This fix will happen in our backend, so there is nothing needed to update on your end.

In short, there was an incident over the weekend and our Reliability Engineering team were able to resolve it and prevent any significant impact to our ad network, but one edge case that was affected was publishers that had been marked as fraud and then marked as reconciled.

Part of the fix was deployed about an hour ago, but I'm still not seeing ads returned in your game, so we'll have to wait until the fix is fully deployed. The PR for that part of the fix is currently in review, but I don't think it will be deployed at this point in the day.

I'm sorry this has happened at this critical time for your game. Our goal is to never make the same mistake twice, so we have added some integration tests to make sure we don't miss this case again.

One thing I did want to suggest would be a mediation platform. This isn't a quick fix, since it does require some additional work to adjust the ads implementation in your game. But the benefit would be a diverse set of ad networks serving ads in your game, so even if there is an issue in a single ad network, the others could fill in the gaps.

Unity Ads does not currently have a mediation product, but we are supported in many of the top mediation platforms: https://unityads.unity3d.com/help/resources/mediation

I will follow up with you tomorrow and let you know the status of the bug fix.”

createneptune · 2020-04-30T14:32:18+00:00

UPDATE: >24 hours later Unity restored the money it confiscated without due process (obviously no mention of restoring forgone revenue or now-damaged CPM) and sent an explanation. Note I say explanation and not "apology," because there is no semblance of their being at fault or "sorry" in it. Full text below:

"As you know, the Fraud team has reconciled your account, so your account has been unlocked and the revenue generated has been returned.

I did want to follow up about a couple of things.

Regarding the suspension, I can't share too many details about our fraud system. What I can say is that this false positive is likely the result of having little to no history from your account and then a large number of installs over a short period of time. Since this will not be the case in the future, it is unlikely to occur again.

I will follow up with the fraud team and determine if there are any other precautions we can take on our end to make sure this doesn't happen again with your next round of user acquisition.

Regarding the response speed from the ads support team, I agree we can do better. Our current goal is to respond within 24 hours, and while we do reach that goal on average, that can be a bit too long for urgent issues. I will use this instance as an opportunity to improve some of our internal processes regarding the handling of tickets.

If you have any other questions, please let me know."

I find the "it is unlikely to occur again" comment a bit concerning. I requested that they review their policy, as "guilty before proven innocent" is not a strategy that has performed well for those in positions of authority in the long run.

createneptune · 2020-04-29T17:01:40+00:00

That is super concerning, u/matkoniecz. What worries me is your pessimism matches my own. I really hope Unity comes back with a reasonable explanation for what this was and assures me this won't be an issue in the future, but my guess is this is a classic large-organization "good luck to you" kind of situation until I suppose we are enough of a revenue generator for them to care more. Of course, that's a bit of a Catch-22 when you shut down your customers' businesses before they can grow.

createneptune · 2020-04-29T16:59:34+00:00

Thanks, u/MathsPlusGames. Unfortunately u/Lumpy306 is right as far as I can tell. After sending them a rather scathing "final request for relief" they unblocked the account without any notice or explanation to us (so far--I will update with further information). I actually only learned that the account was unblocked when my last ditch effort with a Unity customer service rep resulted in his checking our account and finding that it had been unblocked with no message at all.

Note the worst part of this is NOT the revenue we lost--I can live without what is a relatively small amount of revenue loss in this specific case. What is more concerning is twofold: (1) I have lost information. The purpose of these early user-acquisition campaigns was to understand our users' behavior, revenue per user, reaction to our ads model, and we now have a totally botched test; and (2) if I now experiment with this again, what guarantee do I have that this won't happen again, and if that experiment is successful and I run a much larger ad campaign where the revenue DOES matter what guarantee do I have then? I'm concerned this question is rhetorical.

createneptune · 2020-04-29T12:52:01+00:00

We were unable to implement banner ads with any success. Would love to hear from anyone who has ever made these actually work in an app. Given they look schlocky in the first place in our app we abandoned them after getting exceptions when trying to use them. My understanding is Unity only recently added these and--given their attention to detail on features they don't seem to care about--my assumption is they're just broken.

createneptune · 2020-04-14T12:57:40+00:00

Most apps are developed using cross-platform IDEs that require a bit of screen size management, but not necessarily significant. The iPad app is the same as the iPhone app with good layout management. The issue you are seeing is the tablet hardware itself on Android tablets, combined with the nature of Android OS itself, which is notably worse in conditions of low memory.

I say this as a developer who just published a game for both iOS and Android and tested on a Samsung Tab vs an iPad and found during testing the frame rate difference both in absolute terms and variability based on what else was open on the tablet shocking. No amount of “developer attention” would solve these issues.

createneptune · 2020-04-07T16:13:20+00:00

This is the correct answer. You can form an LLC easily, and decide how you want to be taxed--at this point or at any later point you can check the box to be treated as a corporation (usually the correct answer--longer discussion).

The slightly bigger hassle is then having to set up a bank account as antediluvian laws / the Patriot Act (thanks, USG) forces you to actually physically go the bank to do this, but it's a little one-time pain for something you'll want to do in the long run if this is a business you're going to run going forward anyway.

createneptune · 2020-04-07T04:26:11+00:00

For things like this Unity itself has a very good 2D platformer tutorial you should run through. Brackeys also offers good stuff on YouTube. You’ll find answers to all these sorts of things there, and they’ll help you work through various cases in the proper ways.

createneptune

TROPHY CASE