Category Archives: iPad

We must reach the Tower of the Moon by tomorrow

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It’s been 15 score and 7 days since I last posted about The Lords of Midnight. Things have changed a little since I decided to make the games available for free on GoG and to remove them from the Apple and Play stores. Firstly my working situation didn’t change. This was mainly because the government shelved its implementation of the new IR35 rules that were coming in to effect in April 2020. The reason for this was the same reason that has turned 2020 topsy-turvy; Covid19.

During this time I still haven’t done much work on LoM deciding to keep to my self imposed exile. I did visit the land of Midnight time-to-time and managed to break the back of a number of issues, and I enjoyed my time there for the first time in a long while.

I have have finally pretty much completed the Cocos2dx port. I only say “pretty much” because until I produce a release with it, then I’m not sure of any issues that remain. There are some known Desktop problems and I haven’t looked at Android at all (other than it’s under Cocos so should work mostly).

I have also satisfactorily resolved the resolution independence problem that has increasingly gotten worse with Apple in particular going hell bent for leather to release as many different resolution phones as they can managed over the eight years since I original brought the new LoM to mobile. Some of you may have already see the wide screen screenshots that I have posted on Twitter.

With those two issues at hand, I believe I am very close to being able to bring The Lords of Midnight back to the Apple Stores soon. My intention (but don’t hold me to it) is to get the game in to TestFlight testing in January and get it in to the stores proper as soon as possible after that. There are a lot more Apple devices to test on this time around!

After that, I will look at resolving any desktop issues so that I can get the game into TestFlight for OSX in February.

If these two milestones can be achieved, then Android and Windows release will follow very shortly after.

This is the last few remaining issues that I would like to tackle before I push to TestFlight. Not all of them are required to push to TestFlight so I suspect I will attempt an early smaller test release just to go through the process.

He rode on towards the Tower of the Moon a little more gladly

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Thanks to the generosity of Scott Gibbens, who took time out from his 170 mile journey home at the end of a busy day at work, to swing by my place and lend me his iPad2 for testing… the new build is now working on all the devices it can. The only restrictions I have had to make is iOS7. This removes iPhone 1-3, and iPad1, and iPod Touch 1-4. Unfortunately, there is just nothing I can do for these old devices anymore. For the record, the current version in the app store will continue to be available and work on those devices that have already downloaded it, it’s just no future versions (should there be any) will be available.
This new build has gone out to the external testers, and as long as I get the ok, it will head to the store next week. All being well, I will do the same for Doomdark’s Revenge. I intend to release both LoM and DDR for Android, Windows, and OSX as well to unify the releases. However, Blackberry, and Windows Phone will not be getting this release.
 
For the record, this is what is available in this release…
 
1. Added discovery map
2. Added ‘tooltip’ info on map
3. Added cleanup button for lords on select screen
4. Change to undo system ready for difficulty modes
5. Added ability to UNDO from the gameover screen!
6. Handle new screen resolutions
7. Built for latest IOS SDK
8. Support 64 bit devices
9. Cosmetic changes on scrolling views – dithered
10. Update of engine to align with Doomdark’s Revenge
11. Misc minor engine fixes ported from Doomdark’s Revenge