Tag: Game Center

The State of Game Center

My happy blog post on SmartOthello for Mac conveniently skipped my journey through Game Center purgatory. While profile pictures are back, Apple is still not giving Game Center proper attention. I’ve been busy submitting bugs to Feedback Assistant – here’s a sampling:

There is still no way to get notified of invitations without polling (FB5990491).
On the Mac, turn notifications are not received (FB7659591).
On the Mac, there’s no way to edit your Game Center profile picture (FB7667313).

When you try to start a Game Center game on the Mac, you get the following cut off dialog (FB7668604):

mac-game-center-cut-off

(Yes, that’s the actual amount of white space.) Luckily, you can resize it to reveal some more buttons:

mac-game-center-revealed

The worst issue right now is that Apple has deprecated GKPlayer.playerID, and tells developers to use teamPlayerID or gamePlayerID instead. However, those simply don’t work (FB7662712), as the IDs keep changing even within a single game, making it impossible to e.g. cache profile images, never mind reconcile locally stored games with Game Center data. If GKPlayer.playerID gets removed in iOS 14 without fixing teamPlayerID, I will have to pull SmartOthello from the App Store.

How to Play With Friends

The whole process of finding friends to play with is way too convoluted. I’ve improved the UI in SmartOthello 3.0 to make it easy to start a game with somebody you recently played with. However, the process to first find somebody to play with is kafkaesque:

1. Tap on New Game and choose Game Center at the top.

start-game-center-game

2. SmartOthello lists recent opponents, and you can easily start a game with them. To play with anybody else, tap on Invite Friends.

after-invite-friends-long

3. This leads to a screen that has two buttons: Invite Friends and Play Now. While Invite Friends is just lightly outlined and you’re tempted to tap the boldly emphasized Play Now, that would just try to match you with somebody else who’s looking for a random opponent right then, which only really works if the app is much more popular than SmartOthello. So don’t get stuck in limbo; tap Invite Friends.

after-second-invite-friends

4. This brings you to an iMessage screen where you can send an invitation to a contact. However, the instruction “Tap + for Friends and more” is trying to give you a clue that you should tap on the ⊕ button, and then you’re finally presented with the right choices: play with contacts, friends, nearby players, or players you recently played with.

final-game-center-screen

This last screen makes sense – Apple needs to give developers a way to take users directly to that screen (FB7672633). Game Center matching was much easier when there was a Game Center app; Apple really went off-track when they decided that matching should go through iMessage.

I hope this helps others navigate through Game Center issues with turn-based games. If I’m wrong about any of these, I’d love to know! Hopefully, Apple can address these issues in iOS 14 and give both players and developers a better experience with Game Center.

SmartOthello on Mac

SmartOthello 3.0 is out, and it now also runs on the Mac. More on that below; first, we need to delve into profile pictures.

Profile Pictures are Back!

You may remember the profile picture saga from earlier versions of SmartOthello: iOS 10 removed profile pictures from Game Center just after SmartOthello was released. Those images were integral to SmartOthello’s design, so I had to add support for users adding their own images for just SmartOthello. Needless to say, not too many users did that.

Fast forward to iOS 13: profile pictures are back. Finally. While you can’t just choose any image, like you could before iOS 10, you can use Memoji and Animoji to create a suitable image (in the Settings app, scroll down to Game Center, then tap on the avatar to edit it). And as almost all users are now on iOS 13, this was a good time to make the app iOS 13 only and use the official profile pictures.

SmartOthello on Mac

SmartOthello was my test vehicle to learn Swift as well as gain experience with Game Center. (The former went well; the latter made very clear that I would not be using Game Center in SmartGo.) Now I got to use SmartOthello to test out Catalyst and the Mac App Store, in preparation for the all-new version of SmartGo. Catalyst has made significant progress since I tried it last year, and getting SmartOthello to run on the Mac was a snap. Adding it to the Mac App Store as a universal app also worked out well: buy it once, download it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Try it out! Practice against the five levels of computer opponents first, then invite your friends who are stuck at home to play with you.

SmartOthello Postmortem

SmartOthello is not dead yet, but the app has not lived up to expectations. It’s time for an assessment of this project: why I started it, obstacles along the way, and where to go from here.

Motivation

I needed a project to learn Swift and to experiment with different business models. I settled on Othello for several reasons:

Expertise: Expert knowledge of the game, and contacts in the Othello community. (I was the 1992 US Othello champion and have played at six Othello world championships.)
Similar domain: A two-player board game close enough to Go that much of the foundation code could carry over.
Potential customers: A more popular game than Go (think of all the people playing it as Reversi on Windows).

In addition, a trademark dispute had recently been resolved, with Megahouse of Japan making more efforts to license use of the name “Othello” and the trademarked board design.

Expectations

My three Go apps (SmartGo Kifu – $20, SmartGo Player – $3, and Go Books – free with IAP) were all doing reasonably well, with roughly similar profits. I had hoped SmartOthello might add a fourth leg to that stool, and thought I had several things going for me:

Experience: I had years of experience with Go apps in the App Store.
Marketing: I had a good marketing angle (former US Othello champion).
Design: All the existing Othello/Reversi apps in the App Store sucked. I knew I could create an app that gave players a better experience. (And some of those apps were ranked similar to my Go apps on the top grossing charts.)
Social: Game Center online play and leaderboards should help spread the app socially, something I didn’t have in my Go apps.

Obstacles

I made good progress on the app in the fall of 2015, learning Swift along the way. Not everthing went smoothly:

Licensing: I wanted to use the official name Othello, so I had to negotiate with Megahouse. We reached a deal on a reasonable licensing fee (10% after Apple’s cut), but I was not able to get them to agree to any business model other than a fixed paid-up-front price for the app.
iAd: Apple announcing the end of iAd didn’t help. So I was stuck with a paid up-front app for the first year; I figured I could re-negotiate after that (which I did, more below). However, not being free means the installed base becomes much smaller, thus Game Center play would not work as well (there may not always be a player available when you’re looking for a match).
Game Center: Implementing Game Center support was a mixed bag. Achievements and leaderboards were easy, but turn-based game play took a lot longer than expected, due to poor documentation, bugs, and APIs that are not fully baked. I could have implemented my own server in the time I spent getting Game Center play to work.

Release

Those obstacles slowed me down, but didn’t stop me. (Maybe they should have.) I finally got SmartOthello released on August 15, 2016, localized into Japanese, German, and French. In my unbiased opinion, I think design, game play, and usability are the best of any Othello app on the App Store.

Sales were underwhelming. Some possible contributing factors:

Press: I had created a press kit and reached out to press, but didn’t manage to get much coverage. August may not have been the best time to launch.
Go Players: I expected to be able to get some of my Go customers interested in Othello, but turns out there’s little crossover interest between the two games.
Othello players: My contacts in the Othello community were not as relevant as I thought, for several reasons:
(1) The community of serious Othello players is very small.
(2) There are some strong Othello analysis apps on Android, and thus most strong players are using Android, not iOS.
(3) The core Othello community doesn’t really connect much with the general game-playing public, which is my audience.
Megahouse: I had expected Megahouse to help promote the app in Japan, a major Othello-playing country. Nothing.
Unlicensed apps: Lots of apps in the App Store continue to use the name Othello without being properly licensed. Megahouse has had little success getting those apps removed.

So the launch was not perfect. But it got worse.

iOS 10

At WWDC 2016, Apple announced that the Game Center app was going away, and that Game Center match-making was going through iMessage. This was ominous, but at least during the beta period, things worked reasonably well.
When iOS 10 was released in September, the avatar pictures disappeared. As the design of SmartOthello was heavily based around the avatars, I had to create my own bandaid for that.
Together with the cumbersome match-making using iMessage, I think the loss of the avatars was the death-knell for Game Center. (It‘s still technically alive, but without any improvements in iOS 11, it‘s not the technology to bet on.)
I had heard people complain about App Store search for years, but my Go apps always ranked reasonably well in search. With SmartOthello, search was a clear problem. Adding a space to change the app name to Smart Othello actually helped a bit, which is ridiculous. (The licensing restriction of not being able to include Reversi in the name also hurt.)
Since SmartOthello was a $2.99 app, I could at least benefit from Search Ads, but not enough for the app to get real traction.

Advertising and sale

In November 2016, I got the chance to advertise at the Othello World Championship in Japan. The resulting bump in sales? Minuscule. Again, it shows a disconnect between the serious player community and the general public I’m trying to reach.
I got permission from Megahouse to run a $0.99 sale over the holidays. More sales, slightly less profit. Back to $2.99.

Free with IAP and ads

By April 2017, I got the agreement with Megahouse renegotiated, allowing me to experiment with different business models and prices. So I tried free with ads and in-app purchase.
That experiment failed miserably. Sales went from low to near zero. While usage of the app went way up, I was not able to get the number of downloads that would be needed for the ads to generate significant revenue, and too few users upgraded to the Pro version. (My ads may have been too nice, and I may have included too much in the free version, but without more downloads, experimenting with those parameters would be futile.)
It’s possible this business model might have worked better when I first released the app and it got its initial attention; it’s much harder to generate interest with a new business model than with a new app.

Conclusions

Swift worked out really well. I’m very happy with the Swift foundation I got from the Othello project, and the conversion of my Go apps to Swift is continuing.
I’m glad I figured out issues with Game Center before trying to integrate that into my Go apps. At least that disaster was averted.
From an App Store perspective, Othello is more different from Go than I expected. The audience seems to consist more of casual players rather than people interested in a specific game, and as such they are probably less willing to spend money on the game. Thus my experience with Go was not as valuable; also, any conclusions based on this Othello experience might not transfer back to Go.

Future

I still love how the SmartOthello app turned out, and I will leave it in the App Store, giving it a chance to get noticed and grow over time. There’s much more I could do with it, but I can’t afford to invest more development effort into it at this point. Major changes (such as replacing Game Center, for instance) will have to wait until I get the Go apps converted to Swift and updated for iOS 11, get Go Books available on other platforms, and more: it will be a while.

SmartOthello will go back to paid shortly. Grab it for free while you can.

Game Center

SmartOthello as released mid-August:

Blog othello avatar

And here’s SmartOthello mid-October:

The layout of the app was designed with profile pictures in mind. These player avatars disappeared when iOS 10 was released: Game Center leaderboards show boring gray circles, GKPlayer.loadPhoto returns nil.

Some bug reports and a Technical Support Incident later, this appears to be Apple’s intended behavior, not just a glitch. This behavior is so wrong and unlike Game Center that I think Apple will eventually backtrack, but waiting and hoping is not an option: I could not leave SmartOthello in that broken state. The newest version adds the ability to set your own profile picture and uses CloudKit to share these between players.

Matchmaking with iMessage

At WWDC in June, Apple announced that the Game Center app was going away, but not to worry, the Game Center functions were all still going to be there. Player invites would be using the newly improved iMessage; no code change needed. (Sure.)

That may have been true for the simplest matchmaking scenarios, but not for SmartOthello. I’m allowing players to set their color preference to black, white, or neutral, and their opening preference to regular or random. To start a game, I thus need that information from both players. (If they both prefer the same color, color choice will be random; random opening will only be applied if both players agree.) This added negotiation step needed extra work in iOS 10.

Blog invitation accepted

Starting a game over iMessage is cumbersome, adding several extra taps to specify opponent and start the game, as well as context switches. Apple has work left to do there. In particular, there needs to be a way to bypass the confusing auto-match screen.

Why no profile pictures?

My guess is that the missing profile pictures are related to using iMessage for matchmaking. Many iMessage users have images associated with them, but those are through the user’s contacts. There’s no way to map Game Center players to contacts, and for privacy reasons, it’s obvious that Apple won’t make those images available through Game Center.

It would be easy for Apple to add back a profile picture in Settings > Game Center. However, when starting a match through iMessage, that opponent would then have two images: one from Game Center and one from iMessage. It’s a mess, and that may be why the Game Center images were removed. Apple dug this hole for themselves; I hope they can dig their way back out.

Game Center in SmartGo

One of my goals with SmartOthello was to learn Swift (which worked out perfectly) as well as gain experience with technologies like Game Center and iCloud before including them in SmartGo. My experience with Game Center has not been good (poor and outdated documentation, APIs not working as advertised, no way to avoid polling for invites), and Apple doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention to the future of Game Center. Removing the avatars was a poor decision, and matchmaking using iMessage needs a lot of work.

At least I know to steer clear of Game Center for SmartGo.