Our latest iPad and iPhone game, Oil Slick, has been released onto the App Store. We’ll be donating profits to charity for this game to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico, so grab a copy now!

Oil Slick is a challenging game in which you must out run (or rather, out swim) the oil that is spilling into the sea. It is available to download now from the App Store, and is our first dual iPhone and iPad title. Once again, we have used OpenFeint for online high scores and achievements to compete with players around the world.

As you may have guessed, the game is inspired by the recent terrible events in the Gulf of Mexico. From the money we receive from this game, we will be donating all profits to Defenders of Wildlife, to help rescue the animals affected by this disaster.

Our second enabled iPhone game, Alien Attacks! has been released! It’s available from the App Store now for a special introductory price of £0.59/$0.99!

Special thanks to Cyborg Sound for their audio work on the title.

Try and survive as long as you can against increasingly difficult waves of nasty, evil humans. Destroy their buildings using their own missiles and try not to get shot by guys in hot air balloons!

With integration, you can submit your scores online and unlock achievements to compete with players around the world!

Try and survive as long as you can against increasingly difficult waves of nasty, evil humans. Destroy their buildings using their own missiles and try not to get shot by guys in hot air balloons!

With integration, you can submit your scores online and unlock achievements to compete with players around the world!

It is useful to be able to quickly and easily generate texture atlases from a number of source sprites to speed up development. A useful tool when developing using the XNA framework is the SpriteSheet Sample available on the XNA Creators Club website. One downside of this, however, is that you must still manually generate the XML file list by hand, which can be a pain if you have a lot of textures to place on the sprite sheet. Another is that it is XNA only

Because we also do development on the iPhone, it was useful to have a similar generator for that platform, as well as for the XNA framework, so we created a tool to easily generate the texture atlases for us. The packing code is based on the SpriteSheet Sample code, though the tool is written in plain .NET, so does not require the XNA framework to be installed (though it does require the .NET framework). The tool can produce a PNG file with the combined textures, as well as an accompanying binary file, called a TXA file, with the information on each of the packed textures. It also supports removing transparent borders from textures to produce a more compact output. It can also optionally produce a C style header with enums in, so you don’t have to look up the textures by their names.

The help files for the texture atlas generator tool contain information on the format of the TXA files, so you can write your own loaders if you wish.

As well as the PNG + TXA combination, the tool can produce an XNA XML file (and optionally a C# file with enums in) which can be imported into your Content project to build the sprite sheet during compile time. You do need to include the XNA projects in yours to access the Content Processor and runtime types. The runtime library also includes extensions to the SpriteBatch class, to make it easier to draw using the textures.

Finally, there is a runtime library to load the texture atlas on an iPhone. The iPhone code uses the PVRTexture class from Apple’s sample code, so you can convert the PNG to a PVR if you wish using Apple’s texturetool (though this can be problematic as the textures may ‘bleed’ into each other). The iPhone runtime library also requires zlib and libpng

Each zip contains a Readme.txt file containing license information and other tips. You’re pretty much free to do what you want with these things, use them however you see fit (commercial or non-commercial), but remember they are provided as-is, and we accept no responsibility for anything We’ve tried to tidy them up to make them usable by other people, but if you’ve got any problems or questions, post in the comments and we’ll try and help. There may be bugs in these, so let us know if you find any!

• Texture Atlas Generator
• XNA Runtime and Pipeline Libraries
• iPhone Runtime – Requires zlib and libpng

The aim of the game is to breed all of the different kinds of fish in the breeding guide. You can access the breeding guide from any screen by pressing the “Guide” button:

From the guide, you can keep track of your progress. Each group of fish have a page in the breeding guide. You can scroll through pages by swiping your finger across the breeding guide.

Fish that you have bred will have a tick icon on them, so you can quickly see which ones you still need to breed:

By tapping on a fish in the guide, it will show you information about it, such as how long it lives, what it eats, and when it is fertile. We’ll start by breeding a couple of Blue Guppies. The stats for the Blue Guppy are:

Eats

Fish Food

Breeds From

Blue Guppy + Blue Guppy

Other Info

Initial Value: $1
Daily Growth: 8g
Lifespan: 6 days
Fertile During Days: 2 – 5

Any special powers a fish has will be shown at the bottom of the Other Info section.

So we’re about ready to start breeding our Guppies. But first, a note on feeding and schools…

How feeding works

Each fish in your tank will need to eat every day. The foods that it will eat are shown in the guide, under the Eats heading. Most fish will eat another type of fish, so you should make sure that there is enough food in your tank for all your fish, or they’ll starve! Only Guppies eat fish food, which is automatically bought for you to feed them (so make sure you’ve got enough money to feed your Guppies).

The older a fish gets, the more it needs to eat to stay healthy. You can see how much a single fish will grow each day in the guide. It is marked Daily Growth under the Other Info heading. Each individual fish needs to eat this much weight made up of the types of fish listed under the Eats heading.

If a fish doesn’t get fed fully for a day, it will become underweight. If it doesn’t get fed fully the next day, it will become seriously underweight. If, after a third day, the fish still hasn’t had enough food, it will die

How schools work

When you buy or breed fish, they are grouped into schools. A school is just a group of fish which are the same age. When you buy fish from the shop, it will ask you how many you want in the school, and tell you how much it will cost in total.

Each icon in your tank and freezer represents one school. Tapping once on it will highlight it and show some information about it at the bottom of the screen. Tapping again will bring up a pop-up which lets you do things like freeze / unfreeze the school or sell some or all of the fish from the school.

So, we’ll go to the shop and buy two schools of Blue Guppies. We’ll start with 10 fish in each school…

Now that we’ve got our schools, we’re ready to get them breeding!

How breeding works

You need at least two schools of fish for them to breed. Fish from one school will only breed with fish from another school, which is why we bought two schools of Blue Guppies. You can see what fish you need to breed a certain type by looking in the guide. Under the Breeds From heading, it will list all of the combinations that create that type of fish. As we’re breeding Blue Guppies, which breed from:

Blue Guppy + Blue Guppy

We need two schools of Blue Guppy. If we were breeding the Royal Angel Fish, the breeding guide says it breeds from:

Royal Angel Fish + Royal Angel Fish
Striking Angel Fish + Subtle Angel Fish

So we would need either two schools of Royal Angel Fish, or a school of Striking Angel Fish and a school of Subtle Angel Fish.

The more fish you have in each school, the more chance you’ll have of breeding them, and the more offspring they’ll produce. Fish, however, are very sensitive Here are some reasons why your fish might not be breeding:

They are underweight

Underweight or seriously underweight fish in a school will not breed, so make sure you keep them all well fed.

They are not fertile

Fish in a school will only breed if they are fertile. The days the fish are fertile are shown in the breeding guide, under Other Info. For our Blue Guppies, they are fertile between ages 2 and 5.

So now that you’ve got your two schools of Blue Guppies in your tank, we can go to the next day by pressing the “Next Day” button:

After your first day, nothing much will have happened. You’ll have spent some money on fish food to keep your Blue Guppies healthy, but that’s about it. Remember, they won’t breed until after a couple of days, so we need to go forward a couple more times. Go back to your tank, and tap the “Next Day” button again, then back to the tank. Highlighting one of your schools, you’ll notice that they are now aged 2, and so they are fertile. Go to the next day again, and this time the summary will show that you’ve bred some Blue Guppies! Congratulations!

Tapping the Detailed button on the summary screen changes into detailed mode, which will show you the events in writing. Certain other bits of information are only displayed in detailed mode, such as how many fish became fertile.

The first fish you breed in the game are guaranteed to breed as soon as they are fertile, to give you a nice start If your Blue Guppies haven’t bred after a couple of days, it means you’ve probably already played the game for a bit before following this tutorial. Go to the breeding guide, then options, then start a new game.

Making money

It is important to note the lifespan of your fish. For our Blue Guppies, their lifespan is 6 days (again, this is shown in the breeding guide). When a school reaches that age, you should remember to sell it. Below is our tank after a few more days:

Notice our highlighted school has reached age 6 (which is the lifespan of the Blue Guppy). If we don’t sell them now, all the fish in the school will die of old age when we go to the next day. Remember, as fish grow, their value increases, so selling older fish will make you more money, so don’t forget to sell them before they die!

We can sell our fish by tapping again on the school to bring up the popup, then clicking the “Sell” button and typing in how many we want to sell from the school. The “All” button will sell all of the fish in the school.

Go good luck, and happy breeding!

Or get the free version for
a demo of the full game

Anyway, the problem is in the FBDialog.m file. There are a couple of lines that read:

UIWindow* window = [UIApplication sharedApplication].keyWindow;
if (!window) {
    window = [[UIApplication sharedApplication].windows objectAtIndex:0];
}
[window addSubview:self];

The problem comes when you try and show the Facebook dialog just after something other than the main window is the key window. This could happen if you’ve popped up a UIAlertView to ask if the user wants to publish to Facebook. The UIAlertView is the application’s key window and when you display your Facebook dialog, it adds itself as a subview of the UIAlertView (which is currently closing). So, your dialog will start to display, then when the UIAlertView finishes closing, it’ll disappear. The easy fix is to just change the FBDialog.m file so that it always uses the second line, and doesn’t try to use the keyWindow property:

UIWindow* window = [[UIApplication sharedApplication].windows objectAtIndex:0];
[window addSubview:self];