Bytesize Adventures
Crafting bite-sized digital worlds

Rocket Santa approved and hastily removed


Rocket Santa 1.1Rocket Santa was approved by Apple on Thursday 3rd December at 11pm just 1 week after submission. However, this good news quickly turned sour as we found a major bug rendering the game unplayable. I removed the game from sale as soon as we found the bug so as to prevent people from paying for a broken game.

Oddly, the bug wasn’t present in my development build of the game and if I couldn’t replicate it then it would be very hard to fix. A suggestion from @frederictessier to create an Ad hoc build proved fruitful and allowed me to recreate the bug.

Solving the issue was relatively easy but I decided to rewrite a portion of the code to make it more robust anyway. I also fixed a number of minor bugs in the process to take advantage of the forced patch.

I submitted Rocket Santa 1.1 just moments ago (4.30pm on Sunday 6th December). Hopefully Apple are still taking submissions and will approve this within a week or two (in time for the Christmas period). Rocket Santa will be back on the App store once the patch is approved.

I don’t feel that we’ve lost too much since we plan on adding an interesting twist, as well as new features, to Rocket Santa to extend its life beyond Christmas.