Category: Geek / Technical

In last week’s report, I was delayed in my ability to create and publish a new update of Toy Factory Fixer for iOS and Mac due to MacOS and Xcode taking so long to upgrade at the end of the week.

This past week, I focused on finishing my update and started work on the desktop ports of Toytles: Leaf Raking.

Sprint 74: iOS update

Planned and complete:

• Create updated SDL2 libraries for iOS

Now that I have Xcode 13 up and running, I found that to build the latest SDL2_image, I needed to use the tip of the branch from GitHub rather than the latest officially released version (2.6.2). It’s a little annoying, but oh well.

Once I got the SDL2 libraries built, I could build the app, test it in the simulator and on my actual iPhone, and then submit it to the App Store.

And you know what was a nice surprise? Within moments, it was reviewed and available!

Meanwhile, I was still waiting for the Google Play review to finish, which finally happened after about a week.

So now Toy Factory Fixer v1.0.2 is officially published everywhere for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Whew!

Now I will stop looking at Toy Factory Fixer and start paying attention to Toytles: Leaf Raking’s desktop porting work.

Sprint 2022-1: Desktop ports; new mobile requirements

Planned and incomplete:

• Create updated SDL2 libraries for iOS
• Create itch.io page
• Create Linux port
• Create Windows port
• Create Mac port
• Update Android port with new Google Play requirements

Unplanned and complete:

• Add button sounds to main menu for consistency

Technically, Toytles: Leaf Raking isn’t part of the Freshly Squeezed Entertainment line of games, but rather than create a separate blog post for From Concentrate, I’ll just piggyback on this post.

I haven’t updated Toytles: Leaf Raking since exactly a year ago, and I started by figuring out what differences there were between the CMake build scripts of this project and Toy Factory Fixer, then updating the scripts to match where it mattered.

I then updated my GBLib files, which are not quite a framework or engine so much as a bunch of code I’ve been writing, tweaking, and leveraging for all of my projects. I realized that this is the first time I had to put in significant effort to take my latest changes and backport to a previous game. The main changes were related to animation and sprites, so nothing too substantial, but when I get a third game and need to support them all? It makes me wish I had GBLib as a separate versioned project.

Anyway, I didn’t want to spend time doing any substantial feature development, but before I added an in-game privacy policy (not exactly a Google Play requirement but that’s where it falls under), I was unhappy with some of the menu visuals. The main menu has a colorful screen, but the credits menu and the options menu had black backgrounds? It’s jarring and inconsistent.

So I added some color to the background instead, and I think it is still readable. It’s not as crisp, but it contrasts enough, and it fits the game a lot better. And now that I think about it, I should increase the font sizes so that it is definitely easier to read.

Another inconsistency that finally bothered me enough to do something about it? The main menu was silent. You click on buttons, and it doesn’t sound like anything happens, but in the game, clicking on buttons has a distinct sound.

So I added sound effects to all of the menu screens, and now the game feels a lot better.

And then I remembered that the ending screens are similarly not the same color as the rest of the game, so I changed it, too.

I didn’t start any of this work until Wednesday, and by the end of the week I had not worked on the privacy policy.

Once I do, I believe I should be able to quickly build the game for every platform since the scripts are so similar.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In last week’s report, I finished making improvements that should help new players more easily understand what to do in Toy Factory Fixer.

For this past week, I didn’t even plan a sprint for Toy Factory Fixer, thinking that I would “just” publish this update and move on to finally porting Toytles: Leaf Raking to the desktop. Thanks to Apple and SDL2_image/_mixer/_ttf updates, it turned out that publishing an update for iOS wasn’t as straightforward as I was hoping.

Sprint 73: iOS update

Unplanned and Incomplete:

• Create updated SDL2 libraries for iOS

I have been working on automating as much of my builds as I could for years, and so I anticipated that creating a new release of my existing project should have been almost no work at all, so I didn’t bother actually planning to make time for it.

And I was almost right. On Monday I was able to create a Linux and Windows update fairly quickly using my build scripts, and those updates are available on itch.io at https://gbgamesllc.itch.io/toy-factory-fixer.

I was even able to quickly build an Android version and submit it to Google Play for review, which is taking a surprisingly long time to get approved, but it was out of my hands also on Monday.

In any case, that’s three platforms I was able to quickly create a new update for.

Then, I tried to do the same for iOS.

But libSDL2, libSDL2_image, libSDL2_mixer, and libSDL2_ttf all had fairly substantial updates and I wanted to make use of the latest versions.

Well, libSDL2 builds fine, but the other three eliminated their Xcode-iOS projects, so now the only project available is Xcode, which…ok.

But it meant that a straightforward update to Toy Factory Fixer turned into a week of trying to refigure out how to build the project for iOS.

When I tried to build libSDL2_image, for instance, I used the following command:

xcodebuild -scheme "Static Library" -configuration Release -sdk iphoneos SKIP_INSTALL=NO BUILD_DIR=build/SDL2_image-iphoneos

And I got the following error:

error: ApplicationServices is not available when building for iOS. (in target 'Static Library' from project 'SDL_image')

ApplicationServices is a Mac-specific framework, which means that libSDL2_image was trying to build itself using a Mac build configuration.

It is entirely possible that I am trying to build this library incorrectly, and I couldn’t figure out how to use configure/make to more easily specify that it is supposed to be an iOS project.

Eventually, by the end of the week, I found that someone else was having issues with building the libraries and having a slightly different but similar problem.

And that’s when someone pointed out to me that the latest Xcode project updates for SDL2 require Xcode 13. I was still using Xcode 12.

And in order to upgrade to Xcode 13, I needed to finally stop putting off upgrading from Mac OS Catalina.

On top of it all, I needed to do these upgrades anyway, because the App Store requires any new submissions to be done using Xcode 13 anyway.

So I ended my week upgrading from Catalina to Monterey, which looked a little stuck at one point but finished relatively quickly, and then upgrading Xcode which took relatively forever.

Seriously, I don’t understand how long it could possibly take so long to install an Apple-official development IDE on an Apple-official OS. You literally just put files onto the machine, right? I mean, even if it is gigabytes worth of files, what was it doing for hours? From experience, I knew to check to see if it was hiding a dialog box somewhere waiting for me to click Accept or login or something, but I couldn’t find any such thing. I just had to wait.

And by the time it was finished, I ran out of time to take advantage of the upgrades and/or see what changes Apple made that would break my process and build scripts, but I think that since the Github issue was closed recently it means someone else was able to successfully build the libraries just fine, so I hope all will be well with my progress early this coming week.

And if all goes well, then I hope the iOS and Mac updates will get released quickly, so I can finally, finally work on porting Toytles: Leaf Raking leveraging all of this work, too.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In last week’s report, I was slowly putting together updates for new Google Play requirements and anticipating some work to improve a new player’s experience in Toy Factory Fixer.

I continued the work last week.

Sprint 72: New player onboarding improvements; Google Play requirements

Planned and Complete:

• Update Android port with new Google Play requirements
• Make new player onboarding smoother

Unplanned and Complete:

• Highlight craftable toys in inventory

While I only worked a little more than 5 hours throughout the entire week, I was able to get quite a bit accomplished.

I finished adding the privacy policy into the game. I have in-game help pages, and I reused that code to also add the in-game privacy policy. Most of that work was in the previous sprint, so I basically needed to add the copy and make sure it worked properly.

Next, since I’ll be putting out an update soon anyway, I wanted to make it easier for new players to know what to do at the beginning of the game.

Watching strangers play my game at 60 FPS Fest weeks ago, I noticed that at the start of a new level, players wouldn’t immediately know to click on the Hire Worker button, which is one of the only buttons that is currently available.

In hindsight, a new player wouldn’t know what part of the screen is interactive or relevant, so they had to take in the entire screen and try to make sense of it all. The Hire Worker button is a relatively small part of that screen, and it is not obvious that it is one of only three buttons that are available AND that it is the only one that is necessary to start playing.

So I added something that I hope won’t be too subtle:

Originally I was going to add some text next to the cancel button that said “Hire your first worker” but I thought it would have been easy to miss, and it also wouldn’t appear if the player canceled and got back to this main menu:

Once you hire your first worker for the level, then the giant text and arrow goes away.

I keep thinking of other improvements, but they’ll have to wait.

The other observation I made was that new players would often hire workers, then watch the workers separate Bad Toys into parts, then…continue to watch.

It would be nice to have a full-fledged tutorial with triggers to show the player what to do next, but in the absence of that kind of work, I hardcoded something for the first level only.

Basically, if it is the first level, and you haven’t commanded a worker to craft a Good Toy yet, and you have enough toy parts to craft a Good Toy, then you’ll see this also not-so-subtle hint:

I decided to add a highlight to the inventory UI, which I hope makes it easier to see when you can start crafting toys in the middle of a more hectic level. It is much more subtle when on its own, but I think it is still helpful.

And while trying to make this small change, I discovered a couple of memory leaks and fixed them, thanks to valgrind and my unit tests.

With these changes, I am hoping that when people download and try the game, they are less likely to uninstall right away.

I still need to do a bit more manual testing to ensure I didn’t break anything, but it has been a fairly error-free experience so far, so I expect to get the next release out pretty quickly.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In my last report a couple of weeks ago, I finished automating my Mac port work and also got some valuable feedback in the form of observing a number of random strangers play Toy Factory Fixer at a local festival.

I decided to incorporate that feedback into my next update as I prepared my app for new requirements from Google Play.

Sprints 70 and 71: New player onboarding improvements; Google Play requirements

Planned and Incomplete:

• Update Android port with new Google Play requirements
• Make new player onboarding smoother

As has been mentioned in mobile news, both Google and Apple have policy updates that basically say something like “Update your app, or we’ll remove it from our app store.”

For games that get frequent updates and new content all the time, it’s no big deal, but for games that are otherwise considered “finished” by their developers, it’s basically forcing work to ensure the game stays available for players despite the fact that the game would otherwise run just fine.

In my case, the main update I need to do for the Android port of TFF is to change the target SDK, and I figured that I might as well use the latest SDL2 libraries as well.

There is something Google requires related to privacy policy updates, but as my game doesn’t make use of anything that requires such disclosure, it might not apply to me.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t very clear. I had emails announcing the policy changes that said one thing, an Android developer page that said something slightly different, and the actual Google Play policy that said another.

But basically, I felt that I needed to provide my privacy policy text inside the app, not just on my website linked from the Google Play store page. I could just link to the page, but it felt like an app that doesn’t require much should just be able to tell you upfront what it is and isn’t doing.

After almost two weeks, I’m almost done with that work. That’s a long amount of clock time, but it represents very little actual development time. Between going on a short weekend vacation with my family and my father-in-law passing away as we were returning, much of my time these last couple of weeks has been spent tending to family matters.

I expect that I will eventually get the main requirements done, and then I can work on making it easier for new players to know what to do, especially when it comes to hiring the first worker and knowing to command workers to craft Good Toys from parts.

What I hope is that those improvements mean that I’ll see fewer people uninstalling the app in my Google Play and itch metrics.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In my last report, I mentioned how my back pain was preventing me from making substantial progress in the previous few weeks, and that I was working on automating my Mac port build for Toy Factory Fixer and needing to prepare for a festival.

I continued to do the work as my body let me.

Sprint 69: Ports

Planned and Complete:

• Automate Mac port

I have been able to sit at my desk for longer periods of time, and so I was able to be a lot more productive than I have in weeks.

I managed to update my libSDL2 libraries so that they could be found properly by my project, but I struggled for some time trying to get CMake to configure my Xcode project so that it would embed and sign those libraries.

SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES(${GB_PROJECT_NAME}-bin PROPERTIES XCODE_LINK_BUILD_PHASE_MODE KNOWN_LOCATION)

This line seems to be needed to get the libraries that are found with FIND_PACKAGE to show up in the “Frameworks, Libraries, and Embedded Content” section of Xcode. But they would be listed as “Do Not Embed”.

SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES(${GB_PROJECT_NAME}-bin PROPERTIES
    XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS_CODE_SIGN_ON_COPY ON
    XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS "${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2.dylib ${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_image.dylib ${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_ttf.dylib ${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_mixer.dylib")

I found a number for forum posts, pull requests, and pieces of CMake documentation, and I felt pretty frustrated that I couldn’t get things to work properly. I made sure to have the latest version of CMake so I had the ability to set XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS and work with dylibs, but when I did the above, all I got was libSDL2_mixer to show up as “Embed & Sign” while the rest continued to be appear with “Do Not Embed” instead.

I found that no matter how I specified everything, it was always the last library in the list.

Well, luckily, someone runs a great account on Twitter, so when I was frustrated enough to end my day by complaining about my situation, I got a reply that helped me learn more about CMake:

CMake expects a list as the value of that property. Lists are semicolon separated.

— CMakeAid (@cmake_aid) August 3, 2022

Lists are semicolon separated?!

Now, I’ve used CMake for years, and the documentation has always felt a bit obtuse to me. It is very much a reference document and not meant to be a tutorial.

But I have never known that lists were semicolon separated before.

I mean, even the unit tests for this feature don’t feature semicolon separated elements of a list. They are separated by spaces.

But someone on IRC told me that “Semicolon separated lists is how CMake does lists. It automatically adds the semicolons if you don’t quote your items.”

So the following examples would work out in this manner:

foo bar baz --> "foo;bar;baz"
foo "bar" baz --> "foo;bar;baz"
"foo bar baz" --> "foo bar baz"

So I took some deep breaths to calm myself down, and made the following change:

SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES(${GB_PROJECT_NAME}-bin PROPERTIES
    XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS_CODE_SIGN_ON_COPY ON
    XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS "${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2.dylib;${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_image.dylib;${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_ttf.dylib;${SDL2_LIB_DIRS}/libSDL2_mixer.dylib")

And now all of the libraries show up as “Embed & Sign” like I wanted. Nice!

On a separate note, I learned that properties in CMake similarly have some flexibility in terms of what arguments can be provided.

So I have seen XCODE_EMBED_FRAMEWORKS_CODE_SIGN_ON_COPY take the argument ON in unit tests, TRUE in forum posts, and YES in examples I found on GitHub. And they are all correct, apparently.

One last thing was that I wanted to make sure I could build a release version in Xcode, but the default was Debug. Basically, I wanted to create a release by merely building the project, rather than needing to do a separate archive step.

When creating Makefiles, you can use CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE with arguments as Release or Debug, but Xcode needs you to use CMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES instead.

Of course, I found that even when doing so, the release build it creates is a little different in size from the release build that gets created when using the Archive functionality of Xcode, so it might be a moot point.

Anyway, after I got the Mac port automation done, I wanted to leverage it to create the desktop ports for Toytles: Leaf Raking, but there was a game festival I needed to do some last-minute preparations for.

Last Friday, I had a table at the 3rd 60 FPS Fest, and it was gratifying to hear the first player, an 8-year-old, say, “This is definitely a fun game.” B-)

He also had a lot of ideas for how to make the game better, so I wrote some down. Thanks, Rowan!

One of my favorite pieces of feedback was hearing someone laugh about the toy parts getting “yeeted” to the inventory.

I will say it was a bit humbling to see the number of people who struggled to know what to do when they started playing. I know I worked on tweaking the interface to funnel new players to what they needed to do, such as making the START button huge and obvious, or setting the default menu to the Hire Menu so you immediately know you need to hire someone. I also made the workers flash to indicate that you can tap/click on them when you have enough toy parts in inventory to create Good Toys.

And yet, it was very obvious as I watched new players struggle that I still had some work to do to make it more intuitive and easier to figure out how to play the game. Clearly whatever I’ve done so far is too subtle. I especially felt bad when a player felt incompetent or “bad at games” because it felt like a failure on my part to make it enjoyable from the beginning.

So the festival was a successful one, if only because I learned some ways to improve the game, especially for people who won’t have me standing next to them to help when asked. I also got some positive feedback from a number of new fans, including parents who were looking for non-violent, family-friendly entertainment that they could trust.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In my last sprint report a couple of weeks ago, I managed to get the Mac port of Toy Factory Fixer published and working properly with music.

I set out to automate some of the Mac port work that had been manually done before.

Sprints 67 and 68: Ports

Planned and Incomplete:

• Automate Mac port

I mentioned that I hurt my back a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know what I specifically did, other than contort myself earlier in the week to fix a leak under the bathroom sink, and I have not been as diligent about my yoga routine recently. I might have been putting strain on my lower back by leaning forward a lot as I read or worked at my desk, or maybe I was leaning forward because I was already uncomfortable sitting and didn’t realize it.

Either way, I have not been able to comfortably work on anything for a couple of weeks.

Which is frustrating partly because I have been trying to take care of my back so that I didn’t have setbacks like this anymore, and partly because I am getting antsy about moving on to porting Toytles: Leaf Raking and wanting to work on my next project.

Also, 60 FPS Fest is this coming Friday, which is a gaming festival that is free and open to the public, and I will have a booth there. I participated in the first two iterations of the Fest, and I look forward to being part of this one. I was hoping to have a new game in development that I could show off, but it is not looking likely.

Still, it will be the first time I get to show off Toy Factory Fixer in a public venue, and being able to tell people that Toytles: Leaf Raking is available on more platforms will be great as well.

Anyway, I finally had the ability to sit for more than a few seconds without pain, and so I was able to get some automation work done on Toy Factory Fixer’s Mac port, which means that I am that much closer to automating Mac ports generally. Basically, I created a build script that builds the libSDL2 libraries and updates their internal install directory to point to “@executable_path/../Frameworks” and then spent time trying to figure out how to tell CMake to generate an Xcode project that can refer to my custom libraries in the General > Frameworks, Libraries, and Embedded Content section.

I’m still in a bit of pain, especially when I stand up after sitting for a length of time, but I seem to be getting better each day.

I think getting prepared for the Fest this week should be no problem, assuming I don’t have a setback on top of my setback.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In last week’s report, I discovered that my Mac port of Toy Factory Fixer had no music.

I set out to fix that issue this past week.

Sprint 66: Ports

Planned and Completed:

• Create Mac port

About halfway through the week, I hurt my back somehow, which made it painful to sit or otherwise be at my desk, so I only did a couple of hours of work all week. In fact, I might rush through this report because it hurts enough to stand at my makeshift standing desk, which feels slightly better than sitting.

But a couple of hours of game development was enough to figure out that the SDL2_mixer I bundled with my Mac port depended upon libvorbis being installed on the player’s system, which is not what I wanted. I even tried using the configure setting that says to not use shared dynamic libraries, but I later found a forum post saying that it is explicitly disabled for MacOS, so that’s fun to discover.

However, just days before, I saw that libSDL2_mixer had a new update, v2.6.0, that used single-header libraries, so instead of depending on libvorbis, it uses stb_vorbis. I built it, bundled it, and found that the game had music!

So, if you want to get the Mac port, you can get it at itch.io below:

Now, what I still need to do is automate some of the steps, and I have been trying to figure out what notarization looks like so that people playing the game on newer Macs don’t get the scary message about how Apple can’t verify the source of the app.

But I think I have enough to get Toytles: Leaf Raking ported fairly quickly. We’ll see how my back feels after my doctor appointment.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In last week’s report, I was figuring out how to bundle the Toy Factory Fixer binaries and dependencies for the Mac desktop port.

And the work continued.

Sprint 65: Ports

Planned and Complete (er, I thought):

• Create Mac port

Well, it mostly continued. It was a very unproductive week, as I only managed to put in a total of 2.5 hours of game development.

I think part of the reason for the lack of hours was that I was pretty much finished with the work, and then I had trouble finding someone to help me verify that everything worked properly on a machine that wasn’t mine.

I had to change the install path of the SDL2-related libraries so that they reference “@executable_path/../Frameworks” although I annoyingly can’t set it using the configure script because it expects an absolute path.

So basically I had to do a two-step process for each library: run “configure –prefix=[install path] && make && make install”, then use the install_name_tool to change it.

And since the SDL2_image, SDL2_mixer, and SDL2_ttf libraries also refer to the SDL2 library, I had to change each of their paths to that library, too.

Once I had the libraries setup correctly, then it was a matter of telling Xcode to bundle the libraries. Ideally I could get CMake configured to do it for me, but for now I found that I can add the libraries manually to the “Frameworks, Libraries, and Embedded Content” section, AND I can get it to handle embedding and signing for me.

And as far as I can tell in my testing, it works!

The problem is, I didn’t know if it would run properly on a machine that didn’t have my development libraries installed, or even if it would run on a Mac due to the app not being signed properly for it.

Well, it turns out that as I write this, someone was able to verify that the game runs on their machine. So, good!

Unfortunately, there was no music and some sound effects were missing. So, not as good.

My best guess is that while in the previous week I was able to fix the libSDL2_mixer dependency on libvorbis so that it can provide support for loading and playing OGG files, the library still depended on using the system-installed libvorbis to actually do so at runtime.

And I don’t bundle libvorbis, so it is essentially missing on someone else’s computer if they don’t have it installed, which means no OGG support in my game again.

As far as I can tell, I don’t have this same issue with the Linux version. When I check the dependencies on my game’s binary and on my SDL2_mixer library, I don’t see libvorbis mentioned, but then again, I don’t see it mentioned in the dependencies on my Mac either.

So either something weird is going on with the Mac port, which might be as simple as needing to bundle libvorbis or some other dependency, or something is wrong with my Linux port as well that I didn’t detect in my own testing.

If someone is running into something similar, I will throw out that I recently learned about libSDL_sound, which uses a lot of single-header libraries and should not run into this problem. I am not sure if I want to switch from SDL2_mixer to SDL_sound, though.

Anyway, the Mac port is done in that it runs and you can play the game, but it isn’t done in that somehow I need to make sure it plays music properly, which I only just discovered wasn’t working.

After I fix this issue, I’ll port Toytles: Leaf Raking next.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!

In last week’s report, I mentioned being frustrated with CMake’s documentation as I tried to port Toy Factory Fixer to the Mac desktop.

I continued the work last week.

Sprint 64: Ports

Planned and Incomplete:

• Create Mac port

Shortly after my last report, I actually got the game to run!

Well, it ran, but the screen was black. Using some strategic mouse clicks, I determined that the game was, in fact, working as I was able to maneuver through menus and quit the game, so the problem was that the game didn’t have any art assets to load.

I had to determine what was different between the iOS configuration and the Mac configuration to get my art and audio resources into the bundle. For instance, storyboards aren’t supported, so I didn’t need to worry about using them.

So eventually I got the graphics and sounds in the game, but I noticed that some sound effects and all the music was missing. It turned out that the custom-built SDL2_mixer didn’t know where to find libvorbis, so it didn’t have support for .ogg files. I would get an error along the lines of “Unrecognized audio format.”

So this sounds familiar! I ran into this when I created my Linux port, and the way to solve it was by installing libvorbis-dev using my distro’s package manager.

Well, I had homebrew installed on my Mac, but I couldn’t find libvorbis-dev as a package. Was I out of luck?

No, strangely, I just installed libvorbis, and everything worked. Go figure.

Then I needed to get the app icon set. On iOS, I provide the app icons in Images.xcassets/AppIcons.appiconset. Basically, there are a bunch of PNG files that correspond with the expected app icons needed.

After trying a few different things in my build configuration, I eventually figured out that inside AppIcons.appiconset I had a Contents.json that was specifying all of my icons as iphone or iPad icons. In Xcode, I could check a box that said I wanted Mac icons, and so I created a new Contents.json with only Mac icons specified, then created the icons in the dimensions at the Mac app icons expect.

Now it was at this point that I was trying to figure out why everything seemed fine AND the .app was only a few MBs.

Well, it turned out that the app has a dependency on my custom SDL2 libraries, and specifically where I built them (as opposed to where I placed them), and they are not getting bundled. So that’s the big thing that is left to do is to make the application standalone and not require third-party libraries to placed in arbitrary places.

And as I expect to put this .app on itch.io, I believe I don’t need to worry too much about certificates and signing unless I also want to distribute it on the App Store.

Assuming all goes well, I expect to have a Mac port finished soon.

Then I think it makes sense to port Toytles: Leaf Raking and finally, finally start work on my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game.

Thanks for reading!

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In my last report, I was working on a Windows port of Toy Factory Fixer, and I created a page on itch.io, preparing to publish.

I did not have a report for last week due to being on vacation with my spouse (we celebrated our 10 year anniversary), but shortly before that trip, I did publish the game officially.

Since then, I have been focused on creating a Mac port.

Sprints 62 & 63: Ports

Planned and Incomplete:

• Create Mac port

Between one week getting cut short due to the start of my vacation and the next week starting late due to the end of my vacation, I had about the equivalent of a single week’s worth of effort available. Even so, I managed to make some decent progress, I think.

My project uses CMake, and while I love how I can have one set of scripts produce builds on multiple platforms, getting there is frustrating.

The CMake documentation is a great reference document if you already know what you need, but if you don’t, it’s hard to navigate, search through, and quickly figure out what you need to do.

Each time I wanted to find what I could about Mac-specific commands and arguments, the results I found through discovering a completely different website mentioning them just don’t turn up.

For example, for my iOS build, I have a toolchain file that sets CMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT to “iphoneos”, and I figured that I needed it to be set to something that indicated the Mac desktop. The only thing is, I don’t know what to specifically set it to.

Looking at the docs for it, it says:

Specify the location or name of the macOS platform SDK to be used. CMake uses this value to compute the value of the -isysroot flag or equivalent and to help the find_* commands locate files in the SDK.

Now, one of the benefits of using CMake is that you don’t generally need to know how to do things on every single platform. It abstracts away certain concepts, such as defining a library and saying where to find the source files that should be built to make that library, and then it produces the platform-specific build scripts to do it.

But one of the challenges with using CMake when you need to use a platform-specific piece of it is that you now do, in fact, need to know how the platform in question works. In this case, the docs won’t tell you what the valid values could be. That’s going to require homework on your part to figure it out from the MacOSX docs.

It turned out that the value for CMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT should be “macosx”, but I had tried “macos” first before figuring it out.

Granted, part of this is that I am not a native Mac developer, so there is a lot I don’t know about Apple’s developer ecosystem, and frankly, the less time I spend inside Xcode, the happier I find myself.

Luckily, a lot of my iOS-related CMake scripts seem to still be relevant on the Mac port, so I don’t have to start completely from scratch, but I am looking forward to when I can run the cmake command with my MacOSX toolchain file, produced my Xcode project with all of the code signing and configuration setup for me, then simply build and archive the project.

But to get there, I need to figure out how the Mac Info.plist is different from an iOS app Info.plist, which configuration options are required, which ones are a good idea to have entries for if optional, and what code needs to change.

I have very limited platform-specific code, and I hope any Mac-specific code can leverage the iOS work I have already done. This past weekend I found that the iOS code that opens a URL uses UIKit, but UIKit isn’t available on a Mac, so I had to write similar code using AppKit instead.

Each day I’ve been slowly and steadily making progress, between figuring out how to build custom libSDL2 and related libraries (it turns out I can also use configure && make && make install the way I do on my Linux system), getting the Xcode project to generate, and getting the project to attempt to build. I have fixed some compiler errors, and I am currently fixing linker errors, so maybe I’ll have this thing figured out sooner than I think.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, Toy Factory Fixer, or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 19-page, full color PDF of the Toy Factory Fixer Player’s Guide for free!