First, a small celebratory note: Spaceteam was first released on November 29th, 2012, so last week was our 2nd anniversary! I never could have predicted or planned how these two years would unfold. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Second: the Physical Membership Packages should have all arrived by now, so if you haven’t received yours yet please let me know.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately but that’s going to change soon. In the new year I’ll start working on Blabyrinth and keeping a more detailed and frequent developer diary. I’m very excited about actually making it happen. Blabyrinth has been in my head for too long and I need to start playing with it!

Here’s what I’ve been working on recently:

New Custom Versions

The “High Commissioner” Kickstarter tier offered backers an exclusive private version of the app. One person officially holds this rank. Apparently, organizations with budgets big enough to afford this can’t justify spending the money on crowd-funding, but they can contract me independently. Which is exactly what happened, twice, since the Kickstarter finished. So I’m now working on three customized versions.

• The official commissioned variant, which will be designed for younger kids and available for free to everyone.
• New: A university-commissioned version for teaching ESL (English as a Second Language), also available to everyone.
• New: A private version for a company to use at a conference to teach people about computer security/hacking.

Doing these new projects now (they were both somewhat time-sensitive) means cutting into the time I have to work on regular Spaceteam features and new games, but I decided to say “yes”, because:

• They are all inter-related, involving customization and lexicons, so I’m able to integrate some of the changes back into Spaceteam and the Lexicogulator, making them better.
• They have money attached, which means I can extend my funding for another few months (notably, more time than the work will take).

I’m still experimenting with different ways to fund my games, and this is what I meant when I reserved the right to make smart decisions and tweak the schedule a bit. I think it’s time well spent and I hope you understand. I’ll continue to document decisions like this that affect the overall plan.

The Lexicogulator web-app

The final version is being tested right now!

It’s more than just a fun Kickstarter reward, however:

• I’ve had a lot of requests for customized word lists. The Lexicogulator solves the problem in a general way so I don’t have to do custom work each time.
• I hope that other players (you!) will create and share Lexicons that will help keep Spaceteam interesting with very little involvement on my part, which frees me up to work on the new games.
• I wanted to experiment with a “modding” system to use in future games. I like the idea of being able to add new things without making a dedicated update and submitting a new build to the App Store. I also like the idea of other people being able to modify the game. The Lexicogulator will serve as a foundation for further experiments like this. I’m already imagining ways that both Blabyrinth and Shipshape could be opened up to modding.
• I now have some (basic) experience building a web-app that connects to a database service, which I previously knew nothing about. This is probably good for my career in general :)

The in-game Admiral’s Club Members’ Area

Custom controls and medals in honour of our Commanders

I’ll be in touch again in a couple of weeks to announce the release of all these features. Until then… Space out!

– Captain Spaceteam

On Saturday I lured some friends over for a “stuffing party” where we stuffed Kickstarter reward packages and then our faces (this weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving).

We had to stamp, slice, cut, match, stick, stuff, and label packages destined for the USA, Canada, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Mexico, South Africa, Malta, Italy, Austria, and Israel. There was a lot of stuff.

At peak operation we had three assembly lines working independently. As a factory foreman I feel I was harsh but fair. My workers were paid in chestnut pie and other treats. There were some rumblings of unionization but they never went anywhere.

In the end we stuffed 400 packages. I still have about 250 to go but the party was an enormous help. Thank you to everyone who came out.

Now that I have all the final rewards I can report on the costs (shipping is estimated until next week):

• Buttons x 2000 = $574 = $0.29 each from Six Cent Press
• Embroidered Patches x 1000 = $730 = $0.73 each from Custom Patches
• Certificate card stock x 350 = $40 = $0.11 each from a local print shop
• Gold Seal x 714 = $64 = $0.09 each from a local stationery store
• Lenticular Membership Cards x 1000 = $676 = $0.68 each from Snapily Pro
• Medals x 300 = $1,003 = $3.34 each from Awards Canada
• Fridge magnets x 500 = $1862 = $3.72 each from Fridge Magnets Canada
• Envelopes x 750 = $364 = $0.49 each from ULINE
• Shipping x 658 = (_estimated) _$3,626 _= _ $5.51 each using Canada Post

Since I ordered in bulk I still have some goodies left over which I’m expecting to use if/when I reopen the club to new members. The grand totals are:

• Total cost of rewards to send out: $6,755
• Value of leftovers: $2,184

The rewards cost a bit more than my original rough estimate (8% instead of 5% of the total) but they’re still in a reasonable range and there weren’t any huge surprises so I’m pretty happy.

Here are some things I discovered:

• The post office will give you as many adhesive address labels/customs forms as you want (I asked for 600) and I was able to print onto them with my printer, so I didn’t have to address and declare/itemize everything by hand.
• Canada Post’s “Light Packet” service (which I am using) is not available through their online Electronic Shipping Tools. For some reason it’s only available to eBay customers, or in-store. Luckily my local post office is happy to accept and process all the packages and then charge me for everything when they’re done.
• It might save you a bit of money to print things on your own printer, but if the card stock you’re using is thick enough that you have to manually feed sheets one at a time to stop them getting jammed, it will be very annoying. And it probably won’t save you much after all because your toner will run out 😉

To actually generate the rewards I wrote a bunch of Ruby scripts to process the member database, add my own special cases, generate images & labels and annotate them with text in specific positions. Here are the tools I used:

• Ruby (my favourite scripting language) and its built-in CSV parsing tools
• RMagick (for manipulating images)
• rqrcode_png (for generating QR codes)

In between physical reward prep I’ve been working hard on the Lexicogulator and it’s getting very close. I hope to have it ready in time for you to authenticate your identities using your fancy new membership cards :)

Other tasks have been slower going: eg. banging my head against a wall over what seems to be a pretty widespread iPhone 5 crash bug*. I still haven’t found the solution but I think I’ve found a way to mitigate the bug somewhat so I’m going to patch it for now and keep investigating.

Either way, I’m looking forward to pushing Spaceteam v1.6 out the door very soon!

*For anyone curious: the bug is a sporadic memory stomp that overwrites a variable during an asynchronous networking call. However the variable has very limited scope (it’s a local variable captured by a dispatch_async block) so I don’t know how to set a watchpoint to find out what is changing it. Quite frustrating.