Couplett 2 of 3: Development and Submission (and Rejection)

(read part 1)As late summer rolled on, we finally began to give Couplett the love it so desperately needed.

Early in development we faced our first big question. We knew we could build the photo taking functionality (we’d already done so with the prototype) and we knew that we could further optimize it. But what to do with these two photos? Through the design process, we came up with two distinct options:

• simple yet limited
• complex yet complicated

When going through the initial design phase of a project, it’s always good to throw as much against the wall as possible to see what might stick. Did we want Couplett to be an app that let you do anything you could possibly think of with two photos or did we want it to be something that let you do a couple things really fast, and really well?

We explored some options, built some prototypes and started to get a feel for what would make for a fun experience. What we settled on eventually was the concept of “Themes”. We took as inspiration what you see in iMovie or iPhoto - A single thing to select that brings with it all the options you would need for the composition. Instead of choosing a mask, a border, a color, a filter, a crop level and whatever else separately, you select a single theme and we design the themes to have all those things preselected for you. We then offer a few simple options (like position and size of the inner picture) and you’re all done.

It was around this time that we found Terrena, a full time graphics guru. What we realized we needed for Couplett was themes that were truly designed, and Brittney was already otherwise occupied with Uncle Slam. It was also around this time that we came up with the model for Couplett - Tokens.

You've seen "tokens", "gold" or "coins" in lots of popular games. You earn them in the game for performing various actions but, more importantly to us, you can skip all that and just buy them. When done correctly, you have something like Jetpack Joyride where you can just skip ahead a bit if you're frustrated. When done poorly, you have a Smurfberry situation.

Our goal was to incentivize the sharing of Coupletts (and hence, the sharing of the app itself). For every sharing action, you would earn tokens. Facebook, Twitter and Flickr sharing would earn more (since you were sharing with a larger audience) and sharing via email slightly less. This would then be the mechanism to unlock new themes, and as with many of the games out there, we would also offer the ability to purchase tokens in bulk if you just wanted the themes and didn't much care about sharing.

Development proceeded at quite a clip once Roben joined the team and there was even some friendly competition with the Uncle Slam team to see who might ship first. Uncle Slam won that contest by about a week but both came together so closely that it made the most sense toe schedule their releases together. December 16th would be the day. We submitted the final build and settled in to wait.

4 days later, we received the email you never want to get-

Your app Couplett has been reviewed, but we are unable to post this version. For details, or to directly contact the App Review team, visit the Resolution Center in iTunes Connect. Do not reply to this email.

Regards,

App Review

Translation: REJECTED.

(read part 3)

Couplett 1 of 3: Conception and Planning (and delays)

Couplett is finally coming out tomorrow, February 8th. For those that are interested, I thought I'd give a little insight into the year-long process that has brought Couplett to the App Store. A whole year, you say? Indeed. So how does such a simple concept take a year to come to fruition? Read on to find out.In January, 2011, I was having lunch with my daughter. We were having one of our favorites, Panera mac and cheese, while taking a break from some errands. I find that my favorite times with my children are when I get to spend time with them individually. My daughter had requested “the mac and cheese restaurant” and I was happy to oblige.

Being the age of cell phone cameras, I was taken by an impulse we all seem to have from time to time, “I want to capture this moment”. So there she was, across the table from me and I began the typical dance:

• Launch camera app
• lean over the table
• extend arm
• realise that I’m not sure the framing
• weigh the option of using the front facing camera despite it’s lower quality...

Wait a second.

Why am I switching cameras? This device has 2 cameras, if I could just drop the phone in between us and use both cameras, that would be so much simpler!

Thus began an App Store search and I found that there wasn’t much available (or my search skills weren’t up to the task). I filed the idea away and set a RE.minder to talk to John about it on Monday.

After relaying the idea, John started playing around with the camera system and we made some interesting discoveries, the most important of which is that, on the iPhone 4, there is no way to have both cameras active at the same time. No matter how we sliced it, the best we could hope for was two images, captured one immediately after the other. We took this prototype with us to WWDC 2011 and confirmed this with Apple. Barring a redesign of the underlying camera system (or a significant change deep within the OS), we could not have both cameras active at once.

Armed with this knowledge, it was time to dive into active development. Oh if only.

After WWDC in June, we were knee deep in the development of Uncle Slam. In addition, we now had a bright and shiny  (if borderline alpha) new iOS version to content with. But as we all know, Apple is never exactly forthcoming with projected release dates. Could Couplett be iOS5 only? Should we shift Uncle Slam's focus to iOS 5? Decisions, decisions.

(read part 2 and part 3)

The ins and outs of Uncle Slam

Uncle Slam has been a concept for more than a year and a half.It all began at WWDC (Worldwide Developer's Conference) 2010 when Pete Parisi (then of Apple, now of fuzzycubesoftware.com) made an off-hand comment in a game development session. He said, simply:

"If you're designing a history-based game starring Abraham Lincoln you probably don't want to render him looking like an anime character with a bazooka. You're going to alienate a large portion.. well maybe that's the greatest idea ever."

Anime? Let's try cartoon-painterly with a mohawk.

Bazooka? Maybe not, but only because we think we can do better.

Look

And so began the journey towards tomorrow, December 16th, 2011 and the official launch of Uncle Slam. But despite the journey having started - what exactly was Uncle Slam to become? We knew we wanted to use all the presidents and it was this idea that led us to the concept of a fighting game. In fairly short order, we settled on the somewhat obtuse name of "Presidential Pugilism" and began prototyping.

The fabulous early art tests from Brittney really began to inform what the game was to become. When you think "fighting game" (at least when I do), the first two that come to mind are Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. But as fun as those games are, the feel of Uncle Slam was to be a bit less severe. For one, Mortal Kombat fights end with the death of your opponent, so codified in the infamous "Fatality". This was clearly out of bounds for our subject matter.

Leaning away from mixed-martial-murder, we settled on "Gentleman's Boxing". This immediately narrowed the fighting itself (no kicks to worry about) and gave us a much more "Presidential" feel. What presidents would want to bare-knuckle box in the streets after all? A chief executive rises above such vulgarity. But one thing we didn't want to lose was the idea of "special moves". Everyone knows Sub-Zero's ice ball and Scorpion's "Get Over Here!" and we felt we wanted something similar. And so each president has a special move based on their history or folklore that can help to change the tide of a match in seconds. (We won't spoil them here as half the fun is seeing them for yourself).

Feel

The other really big challenge was control. Traditional fighting games all use simple button presses and distinct moves like high kick, low kick, high punch, low punch, block, etc. Looking at other fighting games for iOS, almost all of them have attempted to simply bring this idea directly over by using virtual buttons on screen. If you've spent any time at all using a multi-touch device, you know that this new interaction model can provide direct manipulation in a way that simple button presses simply can't, yet most fighting games seem to have taken the easy way out. The problem is that "virtual buttons" don't simply repeat what works with a physical controller, they are usually worse. Without a tactile sense of a button actually being pressed, it can be confusing whether you are doing what you want and your fingers can easily drift off them while playing.

Given this challenge, we decided to throw out and completely rethink the fighting game control model. Punches in Uncle Slam take their power and direction from a swipe gesture. No more high or low punch. No more fast-but-weak or slow-but strong punch. Punch anywhere, in any direction (but if you like the heavy punches, watch your stamina). The same goes for blocking. A drag-and-hold puts you in block mode but now, instead of a simple high or low block, you can directly manipulate your blocking gloves to anywhere you want.

All of this was made possible by building Uncle Slam with Cocos2D and Box2D. By using an easy to use framework with a robust physics engine, this helped us discover the "rock 'em, sock 'em" animation style we settled on. This was another departure from traditional 2D fighting games which are mostly sprite based. Some of our favorite moments while playing Uncle Slam arise from the times the gestural controls and physics-engine conspire to put our fighters in amusing positions. For instance, have you ever seen Richard Nixon standing on George Washington's head? What about Harry Truman giving Howard Taft a big bear-hug? We have, and soon you may too!

But is it hardcore?

You probably remember that we showed off Uncle Slam at PAX back in August. The response to the game was incredibly helpful to us. Who is the perfect Uncle Slam player?

We found that almost everyone who saw the art and heard the concept got an immediate smile on their face. This told us that our concept was a winner. Then people would sit down to play and this is where the opinions began to split. The problem with a huge show like PAX is that your  gameplay must be so simple to pick up and play that it can be hard to convey any depth and this is where we put most of our efforts following the show. How do we make sure we don't lose the simplicity but still have enough depth to keep people playing after the "gee-whiz" factor wears off? This problem was compounded by the fact that many fighting game fans were immediately faced with a complete re-imagining of how a fighting game is controlled.

But you know who got it right away? Gamers in their early teens. Unlike "core" gamers (among which I count myself), these young gamers don't have 20 years of controller-based gaming burned into their consciousness as "the one true way". In the immortal words of Yoda, "You must unlearn what you have learned". For those willing to "go with it" and work with the game, instead of against it, Uncle Slam offers more depth than I initially thought possible and you will really need to master it to beat the higher levels.

All in all, we couldn't be more excited right now. Uncle Slam is less than a day away and we can't wait for you to play it. Please don't hesitate to let us know what you think!

For the "Casual-Hardcore" gamer

A few weeks back, Handelabra sponsored the 5by5 network of podcasts. One show in particular, Hypercritical, is hosted by John Siracusa. If you are not familiar with his work, he's a long-time contributor to Arstechnica and is probably best known for his verbose and prolific writings on Apple and Mac OS X.While discussing GAME.minder, he made an observation that the app was best suited to "Casual-Hardcore" gamers. He defined this as: "You're enough of a gamer to know that a game is coming out ahead of time, and excited enough to be annoyed if you forgot about it but you're not so hardcore that you are constantly playing games."

He followed this up by saying it might be insulting but I really don't think so. In fact, it kinda describes me to a tee and speaks to exactly why we created GAME.minder. The games industry has exploded over the last decade and the fact is, hardcore or casual, it's almost impossible to keep up on every game you might want to play. When you couple this with the fact that the average gamer is 37 years old, it truly does make GAME.minder, as John put it, an "application of its time".

We as gamers, if nothing else, love to play. But most of us are old enough to have jobs, maybe families and myriad other things pulling on our attention. While we may be interested in what are often called "core games", our approach to gaming may fall more into the casual realm. However, the broader category of "casual games" usually means the Bejeweled and Angry Birds fare.

So now, John has given us a new category - the Casual-Hardcore gamer. Does this describe you like it describes us?

You are your quality control team

It's hard having pride in your work. It's hard taking the extra time needed to make something you are proud of instead of just something close enough. In a perfect world, we would always have time to make a product completely perfect before sending it out the door. But as we all know, we live quite a ways down the road from a perfect world.Over the weekend, I had an experience via the app store that surprised me but probably shouldn't have - I downloaded a truly bad app.

The realities of the App Store and the current economy mean that we as developers constantly try to live in an uneasy lagrangian point between speed, quality and cost. Being first with an idea can mean the difference between success and failure but being first with a bad implementation can be worse than losing the race.

Here at Handelabra, we do our best to make sure our products are worth using. When we make mistakes, and we do, we work our butts off to fix them. But not everyone does. In the new world of indie development and self-publishing via the App Store, there's something interesting happening - the breakdown of quality control.

Yes, Apple must approve any app before it is released and yes, they have a list of rules that ostensibly guard against the bad eggs but my experience this weekend reminded me that the role of publisher is not completely vestigial.

Software development is an interesting thing. It's an incredibly technically precise endeavor that requires a wonderfully artful touch to be done well. And as with any complex undertaking, its hard to find people that have all the right skills in a single body, or even to assemble a team with all those skills in only a few bodies. But the absence of certain aspects doesn't make them any less necessary. And unfortunately, some small developers, when pulled too far by the gravity of costs, lean on Apple to fill the roles they don't have the time or the money to do themselves. But the problem is that Apple, via the app store, is not in a great position to fill that role for us.

We all love Apple, that's why we develop for Apple platforms. But Apple's goals with the App Store approval process are very different than ours with our products. Their goals are to maintain a consistent experience, to protect iPhone and iPad customers from "objectionable content and provide customers with incentives to stay with the platform (and to make sure we're not using any of those sweet, sweet private APIs). Our goal (and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn) is to create compelling, useful and bug-free experiences for our customers. Letting Apple be your quality control department is a mistake. Sure, they may catch some truly egregious bugs (or not) but the factors they are controlling for are probably different from those that will most effect the customer experience of our software.

The App I used this weekend clearly passed Apple's gatekeeper (although it's questionable whether it should have). But before even getting there, it should have faced a much more meticulous gatekeeper who was concerned with the app and it's experience and not simply whether Apple would approve it.

And cards on the table - I'll admit that I'm as guilty of this as anyone. When we've been polishing an app or an update for a month, I want it on the store so bad I can taste it. I'm constantly being reminded by my team that it's more important to get it right, and make it solid before letting it out, short term revenue be damned.

But then, I'm lucky enough to have a team that takes pride in their work. My job in this case is to get out of the way and let those inner quality assurance beasts come out to play.

It's your job to change the world. Steve taught me that.

For a long time, I was under a mistaken impression. I thought that the people who change the world were different, special in some way. For years I was waiting for permission to do something great as I presumed these people had. That somehow, somewhere, someone had given them permission to be great and to do great things.I was just waiting.

When the iPhone came around something interesting happened. Steve Jobs announced it, and announced it's name without regard for the fact that someone else was already using it. It was then that I realized that the people who change the world are different but not in the way I expected. You don't change the world by asking for permission - you just do it. The name iPhone was already taken but Steve knew two important things:

1. This new device was the iPhone in a way the Infogear product simply wasn't
2. He could work out the details later

Steve was a man who didn't ask for permission. While his management style is legendary (and infamous), and his products weren't always smash hits (G4 Cube), what he did more than anything else was get things done. Lots of people out there have the next big idea but they wait until "the right time" which never comes. They try to get every small detail in place before taking the first step. But if you take that first step, and then another, and then another, your momentum will keep you moving forward.

You only need permission from one person to go out and do something insanely great. It is your job to change the world.

Steve taught me that.

-Jeremy

The Handelabra "Who will ship first?" contest

Sometimes in life, you have to make your own fun. And sometimes, that fun falls right in your lap. This week, while working out timelines and scope for Handelabra's next two projects under development, we discovered something fun - Couplett and Uncle Slam are scheduled to finish up right around the same time.Now in some circles, that would just be a happy accident and everyone would just move on. Not here. No sooner had this fact been unearthed than John started in with "Uncle Slam will totally beat Couplett's firm buttocks" (I'm paraphrasing). This lead to Aaron making comments about Uncle Slam being more of an auntie. And so, a wager was struck.

The Contenders:

Uncle Slam

In brief: Handelabra's Presidential Boxing game shown off at PAX Prime. You play as the Presidents of the United States and battle it out to take up the mantle of "Uncle Slam." Project lead: John Arnold Teammate: Jason Hoyt (development) Teammate: Brittney McIsaac (design) Teammate: Jim Paluf (research)

Couplett

In brief: Your device has two cameras but just one at a time? Isn't it time to correct this crime? Take picture from both and comp them together, pictures of friends or your cat or the weather. Project lead: Aaron London Teammate: Roben Kleene Teammate: designer to be named later

The Wager:

As I watched this friendly contest develop, I couldn't help but think that a new era was dawning at Handelabra. The era of late nights and empty bottles . But still, who was I to stand in the way? John and Aaron certainly seemed ready to go toe-to-toe, code-to-code, bundle-to-bundle.

But I also realized there was a need for some modicum of civility so the following rules were enacted governing the contest. To be crowned winner, the app must:

• Be completed within the current scope
• Be submitted to the App Store first
• Not pulled back by us due to a bug discovered while awaiting review
• Rejection by Apple will NOT disqualify the winning app as we have no control over the review process
• This wager is between Aaron and John, if any other team members choose to make a side-bet, it is a separate wager.

The Stakes

Follow the contest

While it may not be shaping up as the "Bout heard round the world!", there is the potential for an upset here. Both projects are already under development, they are different in scope and have different sized teams. Both are scheduled to submit in early November. If you want to see the whole messy affair play out, you can:

• Follow John (@migrantp)
• Follow Aaron (@postmechanical)
• Follow @handelabra
• Follow the hashtag #whowillshipfirst

May the best app fall on it's face allowing the fastest one to win!

They call it "Cannibalize" and not "Take it out behind the woodshed to be shot" for a reason

The image, culturally insensitive as it may be, drawn to mind when one thinks of "cannibals" is of some poor colonial explorer, tied to a spit and being slowly roasted alive. The key word here is - SLOWLY.The reason we refer to a company chipping away at it's own core market as "cannibalizing" is because of this issue of speed. When something is big and fast and sudden, there are other terms for it:

• game-changer
• revolution
• (something)-killer
• paradigm-shifting
• etc

The key problem with the Netflix/Qwickster maelstrom is that someone got a bit confused. They were worried about the cannibals and chose to shoot the poor explorer. And along with the explorer, they also chose to shoot the horse he rode in on.

I've had a Netflix account since before September 11th. It was a brilliant concept at just the right time. The world wouldn't be ready for internet-delivered digital video for a decade (or 5 years if you are not in the USA) and the heavy, bulky, prone to failure VHS had been given it's marching orders. These small spinning discs could fit in an (oversized) envelope and come right to your door, AND you could get as many as you could watch. And one thing that made it more in line with the TiVo's of the world than the Blockbusters was the recommendation system. Tell it how much you liked a film, it could tell you how likely you were to like others. For more than a decade, Netflix happily recommended movies and I watched a ton of stuff I never would have seen because of it.

Add to this formula the instant gratification of watching it RIGHT NOW over the internet and geeks (myself included) were in 7th heaven. The same recommendations, a slightly lower audio and video quality (yes, I still preferred blu-ray), but you can put a lot of value on not having to wait. It was the complete package. For TV shows and "oh yeah, I did want to see that" movies, I could stream them. For the really good stuff, I could wait for the 1080p 7.1 DTS Master Audio spinning disc (minus special features of course - stupid). But they say, when you are on top, you only have one way to go.

Reed Hastings stated in his blog that "companies rarely die from moving too fast" and this may be true. But is death the only option? Netflix, the one stop shop and "complete package" has chosen to split that package up. Where once there stood the (mostly) undisputed champion of home video viewing, there now stand two... somethings? One is the Netflix of yore, but under a name only a pothead could love. The other is Netflix 2.0, all streaming all the time (but no, we don't have that). The truth is, neither is a service I would sign up for today by itself, but for the moment, I have both.

So which of these two "less valuable than the whole" services will get my viewing history? Which one gets my preferences moving forward? My viewing future? The unfortunately truth is that when you're busy "not dying by moving too fast", you sometimes miss things like this.

For an idea how to handle the "cannibalization" concept correctly, take a look at the iPod business. No seriously, take a look at it. It's still there. There's 3 completely different models still (not counting the iOS-based touch). They are still being sold by Apple and they are still called iPods (not podsters, and not being sold by a wholly owned subsidiary). Despite the fact that the good money is on iOS based phones, pods and pads moving forward, the iPod business is the quintessential "cannibalization" strategy. You replace something that was working great with something that still works, but better (even if it's in different ways). The cannibalization comes from the fact that it's still made by you and you can let the old product die on YOUR terms. Taking something that's working great, splitting it up into two things that work way less great and calling it innovation is something very different.

How this Netflix/Qwickster thing will ultimately shake out is yet to be seen. Maybe both services will stick around. But even if they do, both will just be a shadow of what they were when they were still together.