I’ve been meaning to write this one for a couple of months now, but never really found the time and actually got around to do it. So here goes. I started noticing a lot of games on the Android Market with familiar looking icons, and after closer inspection, it’s clear that most of the graphics have been stolen from Jewels. I have not downloaded the games, but I would hazard a guess that the sounds are also taken from Jewels for most of these clones.

Do a quick search for “Jewels” on the Android Market. What do you find? I counted 8 (that’s right, eight!) games that have graphics stolen from my game. Six (6) of those eight games have one of my Jewels graphics as icon image. One clone is the worst offender. It has stolen the graphics, the icon (yes, the actual Jewels-icon a couple of versions back) and get this… even the freaking app description is copied from my game! The best part — and the gist of this entire posting — the game is named Jewels.

Now let’s be realistic: “jewels” is a common word. (All those eight games have the word in their title; most probably there other clones with stolen assets with other names.) It’s not like I invented the word. But why on Earth does Android Market allow two apps (two games, both in the Casual-category) to share the exactly same name? Why? Especially when the copycat app clearly has stolen almost everything from the original app. I mean what the hell? Why couldn’t they check for the app name and prevent duplicate named apps from the Market? I can see them allowing same named apps for different categories, but I don’t understand the current policy at all. (Perhaps that other Jewels has some whitespace characters in its name, I don’t know, but frankly I see no reason why names like “Jewels_“, where _ is a space, should be allowed.)

The Market is also riddled with app spammers, developers (in the lowest possible meaning of the word) that pump out dozens of sub-standard apps and spam them in with different developer accounts. This is of course a whole different issue, and one that doesn’t really matter to me, but it lowers the quality of the marketplace on the whole. I feel that Google should do some cleaning up on the Market, get rid of all the crap — and of the spammed apps using stolen assets (the most obvious cases, at least).

All this “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” is of course to get a share of the attention those popular games receive. I guess I should be flattered that people bother to steal those graphics? Nevertheless, I’m sure that more popular apps have it worse than I do: look at all those wanna-be Angry Birds -games on the Market. Just sad…

***

As you can see, I’m not thrilled with the Android Market as it is now, and I shall carefully consider whether to bring my future games to the platform at all. Apple has things far better on the App Store; the control is much tighter, but at least it keeps some of the crap out. And they don’t allow two apps with the same name, something that became clear to me with iJewels. Not to mention I’ve come to like the iOS-platform much more than Android, but that’s a different story..

This stealing assets thing is also one of the reasons why I still haven’t (and never will, it seems) added the music from iJewels to the Android-Jewels. It would be stolen the instant I hit the big ol’ Publish-button on the Market.

General (Jewels and iJewels)

• Problem: I used to get really high scores and now I cannot get them! Or: the latest update broke the game, cannot get high scores any more!
  Solution: I have not touched the game mechanics / rules except when adjusting the Timed mode. Not once. What explains these complaints then? Well, the game is based on (pseudo) randomness, so it’s just a case of plain back luck(tm). Simple as that.
  Short answer: Bad luck, try again.
• Problem: I don’t want to submit scores, how can I disable the score submission?
  Solution: You can disable the score submission by going to the Profile-page from the main menu.
• Problem: I want to submit scores but don’t want to register to Scoreloop!
  Solution: You don’t have to register in order to submit scores. You only have to accept their terms, and a generated player name is assigned to you. You can change that name from the Profile-page. You don’t have to provide an email address, it is optional.
  Short answer: You don’t have to register.

On iJewels (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad)

• Problem: The game stays waiting for download / update, i.e. the icon is grey and there is “Waiting…” below it. What do I do?
  Solution: This is not related to iJewels but iOS, as I have seen this on other apps even before the first iJewels was released. The apps seem to download normally, but are still left in pending state. In any case, restarting the phone has always corrected this problem for me.
  Short answer: Restart your phone.
• Problem: The game freezes or crashes!
  Partial solution: No permanent solution right now. Restarting the game (by killing it first from the task list) should help. I have been unable to reproduce any crashes or freezes, apart from score submission related “freezes” that have been solved already in the game updates. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to fix something that cannot be reproduced reliably. Check out the question below, if that’s what you mean instead.
• Problem: Switching away from the game and later resuming the game sometimes leaves you with black or white screen.
  Solution: The framebuffer doesn’t get recreated properly for reasons unknown. This happens occasionally, and in my testing it seems that going away from the game and returning once again fixes the problem. I.e. press Home-key and then get back to the game. Killing the game from the task list (hold down Home-key) and restarting should also fix this.
  Short answer: Try pressing the Home-key and then returning to the game again. Or kill the game from the task list and restart it.

On Jewels (Android)

• Problem: Android Market force closes / crashes while downloading or updating Jewels. The game cannot be uninstalled either.
  Solution: This is a bug with the Market. Clearing the Market cache should resolve the situation. Go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> Market and clear the cache.
  Short answer: Clear the Market cache, see above for details.
• Problem: Why does the game need access to my phone calls and/or access the internet?
  Solution: The Phone State-permission has nothing to do with phone calls, instead it is needed to get the device ID, which is required to use Scoreloop (as the SL profile is tied to one physical device). Internet access is naturally for the global scores, and also for the ads. The does work fine without a connection, though.
  
• Problem: I keep getting notifications from the game that an update is available.
  Solution: Update to the latest version from the Android Market. The update checker has been disabled for several versions now, so you must be running a quite old version of the game.

iJewels

Game Center is of course the new social gaming platform from Apple, and is used for the Global High Scores / Leaderboards in iJewels, along with the existing Scoreloop integration. The scores will be submitted to both services, if GC support is activated.

Also in the update are the usual fixes and improvements, so go ahead and grab it while it’s hot — if you’re on iOS that is.

Naturally I will be announcing right here when the game finally gets to the App Store. Stay tuned!

PS. If you’re wondering what’s with the “iJewels” name: the reason is that there was already an app called “JEWELS” at the App Store. I had to pick another name so I went with “iJewels.” “Jewels for iPhone” etc. would not probably have been sufficient.

]]> http://www.mhgames.org/2010/09/ijewels-submitted-for-review/feed/ 0 http://www.mhgames.org/2010/08/iphone-4-testers-wanted/ http://www.mhgames.org/2010/08/iphone-4-testers-wanted/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:52:29 +0000 Mika http://www.mhgames.org/?p=437 Do you have a brand new iPhone 4? I’m looking for a couple of people to help testing Jewels for iPhone on the actual iPhone 4 device. I have been working on to make sure that Jewels works also in the iPhone 4 resolution (and yes, I have crisp, pixel perfect high resolution graphics included, as well! ) and while I can test in the simulator just fine, I’m interested in how the game performs on the real device. I think it should run about 50-60 fps (hopefully the max), but it is possible that the high res graphics bring it down, which means more optimizing work for myself..

Unfortunately, I think the testers will need to be in the iPhone Developer Program to be able to install the game on their devices. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) But it doesn’t hurt to ask, right? So, any iPhone devs willing to test it for me? Drop me a comment if you’re interested. If not, I could try to find people on some dev forums. I do have my own iPhone 4 ordered as well, but I’m unsure if I get it before the game is finished..

UPDATE: I did get my own phone, so there is no need for this anymore. It worked quite well, I had to optimize text rendering though. Now it works pretty much 60 fps all the time. The optimizations also benefit older devices (except 3GS, which was running at 60 fps already) so it was time well spent.

I wanted announce that I’ve managed to start working on bringing Jewels to the iDevices (at least for iPhone + iPod touch), even with the taking-care-of-the-baby-business! I’ve only recently started writing it from the grounds up in C++ with some Objective-C (or actually Objective-C++). (If anybody remembers, the original PC-Jewels is written in C#/XNA, while the Android-version is naturally in Java.)

This time I’ll be using OpenGL ES (which, in retrospect, I should have used for the Android-version as well), so iPhone gamers will be getting the smoothest Jewels experience yet! I might even throw in some extra eye candy, just for the heck of it!

I’ve registered to the iPhone developer program, so I can test on the real devices, which is great. I’m aiming on making the game run perfectly on iPhone 3GS (and newer devices) hardware while still keeping it working fairly well on the older HW (like iPhone 3G). These are of course still only estimates, but something of a goal nevertheless. I’m liking the iPhone SDK so far, and even Objective-C isn’t as scary as it looked like before! But as I said, the majority of the code will be in C++. This actually makes a full circle: I had been using C++ for years before I made a switch to Java, and now I’m back in C++ along with learning Objective-C as well! Neat how things turn out.

As to why I’m doing Jewels again (for the third time!), instead of doing something else. Well, it has become a pattern of some sorts for me; while learning a new platform / language / API, I’ve ported Jewels over. The original was simply because I wanted to try coding with XNA. Android-version sprung out from the desire of learning to write for Android. It was a better game as well. And now it is iPhone. I’m learning new stuff and I firmly believe that this will be (again) the best Jewels yet!

Oh, I also noticed (only a few days ago) that there is already a game named JEWELS at the App Store! Just my luck. Any ideas for the name? I think I’ll have to go with iJewels or something like that, which I really didn’t want to do, but I guess there is no option but to change the name…

So there you have it. Hopefully iJewels (still don’t like that!) will gather some following on the iDevices — now I don’t expect it to be a mass hit like on Android, the competition is much tougher, but then again there is nothing to lose in doing the port (or rewrite, actually). I’m gaining some valuable code to reuse in future iPhone projects, even if the game was a flop.

I’m proud to say that my own top score for the Normal playmode is currently on the quite respectable ranking of 70141.. I did a bit better in the Timed game, ranking at 8167 at the moment. So yeah, there are some good scores about. On the Finland list I’m at rankings 41 and 11 respectively, yay!

I also completely redid the old and ugly Android-menus for something that works (and looks) a bit better, plus made some long overdue fixes here and there, but I guess I should’ve blogged about the release earlier; these other changes are not that interesting..

Also, this seems like a good opportunity to announce that there probably won’t be any bigger updates for Jewels later, I will do some bug fixes and like but nothing major, I think. I need to focus on other things, and due to a rather big personal event (of which I’ll post about a bit later) I need to priorize my time better. Nevertheless, I want to thank all the players, especially those numerous people that play the game regularly and keep it prospering on the Android Market! So thank you!

So it’s been a blast, I still cannot understand why it’s been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it’s Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn’t explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game.

Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I’m not allowed to share any numbers, but it’s been waaay over my lowly expectations..

I’d like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model.

…and still it’s only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me!