Crabitron OUT NOW!

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Crabitron, available on the App Store, April 19th

April 19, 2013 – Two Lives Left has released Crabitron, a lovingly crafted iPad game about destroying the universe as a Giant Space Crab. It is available for $4.99 on the App Store.

Crabitron is designed around multi-touch interaction, encouraging players to play with four fingers at once for best results. Players place two fingers on each giant claw and can then pinch, snap and fling them to cause destruction.

John Millard, co-founder of Two Lives Left describes Crabitron as, “Like a huge, physics-driven puppet that players can push and pull with their fingers. He’s this loveable, ugly crab with a wonderful personality.”

In addition to releasing Crabitron, Two Lives Left has announced their reverse-funding campaign “Crabstarter” . Crabstarter is a semi-serious parody of Kickstarter that bills itself as a “reverse Kickstarter” campaign.

Crabstarter presents Crabitron as a fully funded and finished game and asks players to back the project by buying the game on the App Store. All sales data for Crabitron, such as revenue and chart position, are made available to the public directly on the Crabstarter website.

Two Lives Left co-founder Simeon Saëns comments, “We’ll be making all of our sales data public. You’ll be able to see exactly how much we’re earning, whether Crabitron is succeeding or failing, and where it sits in the charts.”

Two Lives Left has estimated that Crabitron cost approximately $100,000 to develop, and this has become the funding goal for their Crabstarter campaign. In addition, Two Lives Left has added “stretch goals” for additional features and updates to Crabitron once the initial funding goal has been reached.

Crabitron can be found on the App Store at http://itunes.com/apps/Crabitron, videos and additional media can be found at http://www.crabitron.com.

Accidental Crab

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We decided to approach Crabitron’s development like this:

Create a bare-minimum version (lets call this Version Alpha) and submit it to the app store but leave it unreleased

Continue to work on an improved and extended version (lets call this Version Beta)

This way, we could release Version Alpha whenever we wanted.

We also needed an initial version because we had already created the app in iTunes to reserve the name Crabitron and there is a time-limit in which we have to use the name (upload a binary) or lose it forever.

Unfortunately there was one little snag. Once you upload the first binary for an app, you have to set the release date and that date can only be a late as Dec 31st next year. Well, because development took quite a bit longer than expected, that day actually came and the game was automatically released. Luckily we had a google alert setup for the search term “Crabitron” and the alert notified us of the itunes page and we could change the date to the next year. Problem solved, right? Development continued to take much longer than we wanted, due to having full-time jobs and other projects that demand time, such as Codea.

It happened again! And this time we were alerted by a third party. After the game had been released for a few days. No big deal except…

CrabAccidentSales

Okay, so some people bought Version Alpha. These sales were purely from new app categories and sites that index them. Sales even seemed to pick up a little by day 4. Still, the game wasn’t in a state that we were happy to sell so we pulled it from the store. Even with the basic state the game was in at least one customer was happy.

CrabAccidentReview

 

That brought a smile to my face. I hope whoever wrote that review enjoys the final version :)

Cargo-Bot Released

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Cargo-Bot – The first game on the App Store programmed on an iPad – has been released.

The Press Release follows.

Cargo-Bot

The First Game Programmed on iPad

Adelaide, Australia – April 24, 2012 – Two Lives Left and Rui Viana have released Cargo-Bot, a puzzle game where the player commands a robot to sort crates. Cargo-Bot presents players with fiendishly clever puzzles and features stunning retina graphics. It is available for free on the App Store.

Cargo-Bot was programmed entirely on iPad using Codea, a touch-based programming app for iPad created by Two Lives Left.

It’s the first game of its kind, prototyped, programmed and polished on iPad. Cargo-Bot was created by Rui Viana, a Codea user who developed his initial prototype and shared it with the Codea community. Two Lives Left reached out to Rui in order to turn his prototype into a published App Store game. They also enlisted the aid of Fred Bogg, a composer who developed a music library for Codea, to create the music for Cargo-Bot.

Coinciding with the release of Cargo-Bot, Two Lives Left is releasing the Codea Runtime Library source code under the Apache License Version 2.0. Registered Apple iOS Developers will be able to export their Codea projects into the Codea Runtime Library in order to release them as standalone apps, just like Cargo-Bot.

Cargo-Bot can be found on the App Store, videos and additional media can be found at cargo-bot.com.

The Codea Runtime Library source code and documentation can be found at http://github.com/TwoLivesLeft

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The Case of the Coffee Smart Cover

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I bought a new iPad a few weeks ago. With it, I also purchased the tan leather Smart Cover.

I’m not too careful with my cover. I chose the leather cover thinking the more scuffed and damaged it got, the better. I wanted it to look worn. Unfortunately after only two weeks of use it did start to look worn — on one side only.

As you can see in the above photos the right side of the cover is darkened in the place I usually hold it while reading.

This asymmetry wouldn’t do. I had a wonderful, horrible idea: I’d stain the cover with coffee.

I prepared a double shot of coffee using fresh beans.

I had no idea whether this would work. But I reasoned at worst I’d end up with an interesting experiment and an utterly ruined Smart Cover. And even if it looked terrible, it would still function as a cover.

I got a brush and started brushing the coffee onto the cover.

(This is one of those rubber bristled brushes. For cooking. It’s all I could find when rooting through the kitchen drawers.)

Here’s the cover soaked in coffee. The first pass.

I let it sit for a few minutes and then dried it by dabbing gently with a paper towel. The excess coffee came off and it looked much darker.

I wasn’t too pleased with how it looked after the first pass. So I gave it a few more coats. Then, after drying it gently, I scrubbed it with an old tea-towel. This gave the cover a subtle texture and it looked more pleasing.

It still wasn’t right, though. And thinking that I might experiment some more I decided to scrub the cover with ground coffee. So I ground some coffee at the coarsest grind setting and tipped it onto the cover.

I rubbed the coffee into the cover using my fingers. At the time I wondered what on Earth this would actually achieve. Regardless, I continued.

I wiped away the excess coffee granules and saw that it didn’t turn out too bad. I actually liked the resulting cover more than the original. Success!

Here are some photos of the finished cover. It has dulled a little since taking these, but I still like it more than the original tan colour.

Codea and Code Sharing

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I’ve seen a number of interpretations about why Codea’s project sharing feature was removed.

Here’s what happened.

We were contacted late December last year (20th or so) by an Apple App Reviewer. He informed us that Codea’s project sharing feature violated section 3.3.2 of the Developer Agreement.

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework, provided that such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application as submitted to the App Store.

While Codea doesn’t, and has never “downloaded” code. It did “install” Lua source code if directed to do so by the user. That is, a user could open Mobile Safari, point it at a .codea project, and be given the option to “Open in Codea.” This then placed the file into Codea’s sandbox and Codea would extract that file into a new project for the user.

This is essentially the same as the user visiting a website which displays the source code, selecting the text, copying it to clipboard, and pasting it inside the code editor. Except a lot more convenient.

I mentioned this to the App Reviewer over the phone. I think I even asked him, “What happens if the user types code into the app that they see somewhere on the web, is that downloading?”

The answer I got was that it’s a grey area. And most app reviewers are not able to make a decision like this – so they must err on the side of caution. However, the app reviewer was extremely friendly, helpful and completely open to allowing me to initiate further discussion with Apple over this matter. He even started the appeal process for me. This makes me hopeful that when this issue is examined further it will be possible to come to a solution.

It would be great if iOS development tools warranted their own clause in the agreement.

Codea Forums & Rename

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Codea (Codify) has a flourishing community you can join here: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk

All sorts of cool projects and hacks have been developed. Such as importing your own graphics, a vector font renderer, and a project for porting Codea/Codify projects to Mac, Windows and Linux using love2d

You may have heard that Codify is being renamed Codea in the next update, which is currently in review with Apple. The name is a combination of Code and Ideas, we feel this suits the application’s philosophy.