Hey, everybody. We have had nothing but difficulties with Apple. At the moment Critter Defense is conveniently not in the App Store because of some glitch submitting an update. We should be back tomorrow (Thursday, August 6th). I apologize for this.

I’ll post an update here when it’s back.

(Needless to say, we’re pissed. Apple has been a nightmare to deal with. What a stain on their otherwise quite nice reputation all of this has been.)

Update, 4pm:

And we’re back in the store. Sigh.

So we track pretty much everything we can when someone plays Critter Defense. It’s neat to watch and see how your game design holds up when people actually play. And you get a few surprises — like (for example) that our toughest levels seem to be in the Seashore (middle) stage — Seashore-3 and Seashore-4, specifically. Hm! We’ve haven’t settled on the significance of this, but it seems to be a fact.

Anyway. If you’re interested, I’ve put together some Google Charts with data we’ve collected so far. If you’re playing Critter Defense, it could be interesting to compare your experience to. If you haven’t finished the game and are looking for a little hint, maybe this will at least tell you which waves may be the toughest. So you can steel yourself.

The pie chart on the right shows the percentages of times players have won or lost a level. The bar graph on the right indicates within which waves players lost. The taller the bar, the more losses.

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Hey, our first update has hit the App Store. Make sure to grab it.

The big new thing is Facebook Connect support — this’ll let you see custom high score lists with just your friends. Lots of games do this, of course, and it’s a fun way to filter high scores in a somewhat more meanful way. Right? Indeed.

What else? Some speed improvements here and there and hopefully a crash or two fewer — although, honestly, we’ve had crashes, but not really many at all and (happily) none that have been reported during the actual gameplay. Which would suck. So fingers crossed on that. But we’ll keep our eyes open.

Other news:

Does anyone out there have any better way of dealing with Apple about App Store issues? We’re newbies, obvs, but poor customer support appears to be a common issue. There may be no answer. You can imagine how frustrating it is when you can’t get questions answered or have minor issues addressed in a timely manner (if at all). I’m not yet considering abandoning the platform (as others have — we only just got here), but I’m annoyed. Not sure if says very good things or bad things about Apple that the experience as an App Store dev is so rough. I’ve paid $198 for a developer’s license — one would think that a purchase of this cost would have a bit friendly customer support behind it.

But so it goes. Our experience hasn’t been awful, and we’re actually happy to report fairly big sales (better than expected) these first weeks and a tremendous number of levels played. Yeah, we’re like Sting: Every tower you place, every critter you kill, we’ll be watching you. I hope to have some fun charts and graphs about that up here soon — stay tuned.

Thanks, everyone! Hope you’re having fun with Critter Defense!

(Allegedly.)

So. Hello. Welcome to the blog.

Y’know, we heard horror stories and I kind of expected that we would submit the app and then wait, like, four weeks and have Apple come back to us with some little niggle like our web-based forums could allow a user to say the word “poop” and, therefore, could you please resubmit with an “Adults Only” warning and then it would take another month to for them to find some new error and then, maybe, by Christmas 2013 or so Critter Defense would hit the store — just in time to be removed for not being iPhone OS 7.1 compatible.

But it didn’t happen that way.

Critter Defense has been approved after a mere twelve days of waiting. Which, in geological terms, is like a second. The game is not in the store, you may note, because I filled out the form on iTunes Connect to let Apple know to make it go live on Monday (so we’d have a weekend to just double-check all of the web functionality — just in case). So I guess they have to approve that. Which may take years. But I’m hoping that they’ll just say “okay” as soon as someone shows up Monday morning with their bagel and coffee and so I am proud to announce after several months of development that:

Critter Defense goes live Monday, July 20th!

That this day is the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing is, I believe, a sign that someday man will walk on Mars. And that man will have an iPhone. And the first iPhone game played on another celestial body will, in fact, be Critter Defense. America will cheer. Small towns will name high schools after it. And it will possibly even become a US Senator.

We can dream.

So if you’re reading this on or after July 20th, go buy it now. Be a part of that dream.