🍏It’s Happening!🍏 | Patreon Weekly #97

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, real quick, Patreon Poll #16 has just concluded! Here are the results:
Spectral Necromancers:   92%
Unstable DM-100s:              54%
White Ripper Demons:       38%
The results speak for themselves here. Spectral necromancers got very strong support and so I’ll get them implemented in a future update, probably v0.9.4.

For the rest of this weekly, I’m shifting gears a bit and covering…

iOS Progress!

After mentioning iOS porting at the start of this year, I’m finally ready to share my progress on it!

Earlier this year I purchased a new MacBook Air and a used iPhone SE to compile and test Shattered for apple devices.

Getting the game’s code to run on the Mac was pretty straightforward. Shattered is written in Java, which runs on any computer that supports installing a Java runtime. Android apps are built around java, all modern desktop platforms have Java support, but iOS has no java support at all.

To get around this, I’m using cross-compiling tool called RoboVM. RoboVM translates compiled Java code into machine code that runs directly on a device, no java runtime required! This results in a compiled binary that in theory should run on iPhones!

Of course, the game didn’t just immediately work after being translated. It compiled and installed on my test iPhone but would instantly crash. Thankfully, most of these crashes were easy to figure out, and stemmed from configuration issues in RoboVM, not from the game code. After spending a little while tinkering…

Shattered Pixel Dungeon runs on iOS!

This doesn’t mean that Shattered will be on the Appstore tomorrow, but we’re getting closer! There are still some major technical kinks to work out, and I have to go through the process of getting the game approved by Apple, which may involve input from Watabou.

However, there is a service on iOS that might let me temporarily avoid those problems: TestFlight! Apple’s TestFlight service lets me do a limited beta test of the game after going through a lighter ‘beta’ approval process. Beta testing Shattered on iOS will be free, but the beta builds will expire after 90 days.

I’m going to set up a developer account and submit the game to TestFlight VERY SOON. Once that’s approved, I will immediately make the beta available to Shattered Supporters. Soon after the initial beta wave, I will expand the beta to all patrons in a future weekly (Weekly #100 might be a good fit)! From there I’ll keep expanding the beta until eventually I’m ready to make an announcement and commit to a release on the Appstore proper.