Crash on Launch | Patreon Weekly #202

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share a little story about releasing v2.0.2 on iOS.

We also have the results for Patreon Poll #40! Here are the Weapons first:
Sickle and War Scythe:             73%
Spiked Club and Spiked Maul: 40%
Pike and Lance:                         24%
It seems we have a clear favourite! As somewhat expected, weapons with harsh downsides didn’t do so well compared to the more plain sickle and scycthe. Harvest also addresses the very common feedback that players want a bleed mechanic on weapons. Several people mentioned disliking that the pike and lance were in the same tiers as the spear and glaive though, and I do agree that something like a T4 lance might work better sometime in the future.

And here are shop items:
Ground Items:    22%
Either:                 33%
Interface Items: 53%
It seems there was a clear preference for interface items after all, so that’s what I’ll look to do in the future. A few folks noted that interface items might not let the player see a shop’s contents at a distance, and that is something I’ll keep in mind. It’s worth noting that seeing items at all in the fog of war is a Shattered QoL change though, and one that I was mainly intending for items the player themselves dropped.

A Little v2.0.2 Trouble

If you’ll allow me to vent just a bit, I’d like to talk about an issue that happened a few days ago while releasing v2.0.2 that devoured an entire workday.

These days I lean pretty heavily on beta testers for QA when releasing updates, so even patches go to beta for a day or two before releasing. I release v2.0.2 to beta and it goes live on Steam and Google Play almost instantly.

A day passes, Apple approves v2.0.2 while the Steam/Play versions are running smoothly. Confident in v2.0.2’s stability, I hit the ‘go’ button on iOS before heading over to visit family for a couple of days. About an hour later I check my phone and see that LITERALLY EVERYONE is getting crashes on launch when trying to release v2.0.2 on iOS, great. I yank the v2.0.2 iOS beta offline and try not to think about it.

A couple of days later I’m back home and start trying to figure out what the hell is causing this crash only on iOS devices. Unfortunately, iOS crash reporting isn’t great for Shattered, so all I can really glean from the reports is that the crash is happening exactly as the game launches. Running the game locally works fine, privately re-publishing a new build of the exact same code works fine. Great, I think, there must be some condition my test device isn’t matching that’s extremely common. I revert back to v2.0.1 and do a few runs, get some badges, and fill in the rankings a bit. Update to v2.0.2, no crash.

The thought then occurs that an instant crash shouldn’t tie to game data at all really, as the game only starts loading things once the user presses a button to leave the welcome screen. Additionally, I notice that I got emails from Apple about v2.0.0 successfully processing after I pulled the update. Did something wonky happen in Apple’s servers somehow and was my build of the game fine after all?

I hesitantly make my re-release of v2.0.2 public to all testers and brace for more crash reports. After a few hours of silence, it seems pretty clear that for some reason Apple took a day to approve my build, let me release it, but never actually finished processing it for users to install and play. Just another thing I’m going to have to pay attention to while releasing beta builds of Shattered I suppose.

I hope my frustration can provide you guys with a little entertainment; we’ll be back to v2.1.0 content next week.