A big meaty thank you 🥩 (and progress update!)

Hi all,

This update is long overdue, but hopefully it's the one you've been waiting for!

First of all, a big big big thank you! ❤️

For all of the support, kind words, patience and just overall love for Charlie 🥰 You're all amazing and I can't wait to get Charlie back to you!

Your support helped me pay for the Apple Developer program membership and all the coffee for the late-night coding sessions. I really value and appreciate it.

Progress update 🛠️

I am making progress! Although it's a bit slower than anticipated due to a quite heavy workload during the week, I'm doing all I can in my spare time to get Charlie back.

So far this is the work that has been done:

• All game crashing issues should now be resolved and the app should run smoothly on iPhones!

• Banner and interstitial (randomly popping up video) ads have been completely removed from the game, so now there's no annoyances when you play the game.

• Many UI fixes across the board to make the game work on the different screen sizes

• Permission fixes, so that the game can use the microphone, camera, save to photos, push notifications etc

• Fixing of old and deprecated code, refactoring to remove hundreds of warnings and issues. Right now we're down to 77 warnings, which I still aim to fix before release the game back on App Store. This will ensure it will also "survive" longer before it's outdated again :)

• Updated, removed or replaced all dependencies and integrations

What's missing?

• Sharing videos and photos - historically there was no option to show a share sheet where you'd just share to any/all apps your phone has installed so we had to implement it ourselves. There's some benefits to having it integrated directly within the game, but I'm leaning towards replacing it completely with native iOS share sheet. If you have an opinion, let me know

• Video ads for earning meatballs - I need to find a new video ads provider as the one that has originally been used is no longer in business and implement their SDK to enable showing of ads

• In-app purchases are not working yet - I have to re-implement them from scratch so that will take a few hours and a few more hours of testing afterwards

• iPad version has not been looked at yet, but the codebase is the same - so I only expect to address some UI glitches and issues once I get to it

• Potentially re-balancing the minigames to allow for earning more meatballs and faster level unlocks

• Running minigame seems to have some hitbox issues, so I'll have to look into that

• Small UI tweaks across the whole game

Testflight beta testing 🐞

Good news! Since I was able to produce a working build and renew the Apple Developer Membership I was also able to upload a build to App Store Connect, which I've then submitted for review for Testflight beta testing.

This means that I'll be able to provide a link for beta-testing Charlie to everyone in the Medium tier and up quite soon (unless Apple decides to reject it for some reason). I'll be sending out invites to you personally when this is approved. Apple gives a general timeline of 48 hours for beta reviews, but hopefully it's sooner than that.

I also welcome all feedback, bug reports and other issues you might find in the game so that I can fix them before public release.

Timeline ⏰

Even though I've made good progress I might take a bit more time before the game is ready for release, so I'm updating the timeline to the end of August. I know I've promised two weeks last week, but I want to make sure that Charlie works exactly as it used to and that I set a realistic timeline given my work-week obligations.

If I manage to do it sooner then it's gonna be a nice surprise 😅

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Thanks for your ongoing support!

-Dom