It's official. On Thursday evening I sent out OttoJotts Alpha 2 to testers. I've picked up 3 more testers since Alpha 1, which I'm hoping will help when I start getting into needing to test multiplayer. The Alpha 2 has a LOT of stuff in it, including:
- Statistics for game play, including games played, won, and average guesses per game
- New help file - this is a huge improvement and MUCH better than Alpha 1's
- New background images - basic changes, but look pretty good; not final, though
- Server-based word lists (the entire word list is on the server now)
- Persistence between launches. Less of an issue with multitasking in iOS 4, but a major pain in anything previously
- Automatically scrolls to the bottom of the guesses list on load - something that should have been done for Alpha 1
- Upgrade to iOS 4 support - this was far more involved than I expected it to be
- Numerous UI improvements and tweaks - just a lot of pet peeves and usability tweaks to make it easier to use and understand (I hope)
So quite a lot, but the lion's share of the time was spent in migrating from iOS 3.1.3 support to iOS 4, primarily because some things just didn't work as expected in iOS 4. Part of that arose from needing to refactor a bunch of stuff and reworking some of the child/parent messaging, but overall things seem pretty stable with Alpha 2 (on my devices), so I'm happy for the nonce. I'm hoping to get some feedback on the build while I start work on Alpha 3 (almost completely multiplayer stuff). It's coming together - slower than I expected, but I think it's going to end up being pretty good when I'm done.
Back to the salt mines.
