The past few months I’ve been trying to refine Zone of Fire to remove any weird behaviors or bugs. A few months ago I posted the first version to a private Beta test of friends and family. I got a lot of feedback and I think the game is much better than it used to be.
I had to make some compromises as well since some of the bug reports would take too long to fix like showing the exit path of enemy troops before they enter the screen. If you look at my last post’s screen shots of the game and you have a sharp eye, you’ll notice that the exit flags no longer exist in the game and the top UI bar is a little different and includes the current level number.
I posted about 8 versions for Beta testing using Apple’s TestFlight app. I got some excellent feedback from a lot of people including the guys who made the music for the game, Tracey Larvenz and Ashoka Thiagarajan. Testing was also done by friends and family including Brandi Brown, Max Fields, Wesley Hall, Evan Hulett, Jason Hulett, John Hulett, Brent Kusuhara, Matthew Lee, Cole Sakamoto and Kiser Tinson. I especially want to thank my dad, Otto Lee, who found so many things to fix that my notebook ran out of paper before it was all said and done.
There’s a lot that went into releasing the game other than just creating it. I had to create four screenshots for six different resolutions which was pretty time consuming. When you release a game to the iOS store, Apple requires that the app itself has all of the right information in it such as specific information in the Info.plist (metadata file), adding pictures for every icon resolution, setting the appropriate CPU architecture for the game and making sure everything just looks right.
I submitted 1.0 build 9 to Apple for review and hope to release the game soon. Stay posted for the release!