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How To: Use a Custom Game Center Turn Based Notification Sound

There is one thing I briefly mentioned in my post last week about the Game Center Turn Based APIs that I want to expand on a bit. While currently Game Center’s turn based push messages don’t match your app, there is an undocumented way to make the notification “sound” like you want it. The following method works on iOS 5 and 5.1 currently.

All you need to do is add a single sound file to your application bundle and iOS will automatically play that sound file when a turn/invite notification is sent to the user. The file is GKInvite and the format/extension must be either .caf, .aif or .wav.

An example GKInvite.wav from Words Play

Once this file is in your bundle, the rest will take over automatically. While this is undocumented it wont break your application if Apple changes it in the future. If you want this documented I suggest you file a similar radar to this one by me (rdar://problem/11168479) to get Apple to be more clear and add it to the documentation. Will Apple reject for this use in the future? Lets hope not and hope that the lack of documentation is just an oversight.

Thanks to fellow iOS developer Jason Lust who first posted about this sound on the Apple Dev Forums. Hope this information is helpful for developers out there using Game Center Turn Based APIs.

Words Play: Reflections on Game Center’s Turn Based APIs

When we at Stand Alone set out to create Words Play we wanted to create a word game with a better user experience than what was out there on iOS already. We wanted it to be faster, more responsive and tailored to iOS as well. Then we added unique features to set us apart like word lookup, turn history, pass and play, achievements and AI play. We felt we could make what we felt was a great well rounded turn by turn word game, and I think we got pretty close to that goal with our latest update that came out this past week where we added a multiplayer chat feature as well as cleaning up the application UX a bit.

Another advantage of being on iOS was Words Play could take advantage of iOS 5’s newest Game Center Turn by Turn APIs. Using these APIs it affords us a game that could be run without needing to run a costly server infrastructure to handle the matchmaking and turn by turn handling. The turn by turn API and its backing server architecture is a nice benefit Apple provides developers of their platform that most other platforms do not even begin to offer. Running a server can be difficult and very costly, and we were happy to see Apple attempt to fill this need with a popular genre of games that run on their platform.

While we continued building the app and getting more intimate with the new Turn Based APIs we found it all very lacking. We feel now that it needs some work to really become a full on replacement for running your own services. From strange usability issues, lack of server data analysis tools, or just plain odd architecture decisions. Below you will find a list of our top issues (with linked bug reports) that we discovered over the past six months as well as a brief description on how that impacted our design. If these issues were to be solved it would dramatically improve Game Center for the better.

The purpose of me bringing up these issues is not to bitch and complain, but to inform other developers and hopefully get some attention to these issues. I actually see the value and potential in Game Center and I want to see Apple improve it. I’d love to see it become a killer-feature for the platform instead of what it is today. So we’re hoping that Apple will make strides to improve these issues in both iOS 6 and the upcoming Mac OS Mountain Lion which brings the Mac Game Center support.

This is a big one, we find it amazing that inviting or rematching players is not supported still. The API to do it is all there, just doesn’t work at all. There are numerous complaints about this on the Apple Developer Forums and my radar is far from the first, yet the problem still exists and that’s really disappointing. So instead of a simple one button press for a rematch the user is forced to perform just shy of 10 taps to setup a rematch. See the image flow below, this could be much better as the bottom half of the image shows.

This is a bit related to the previous bug, but still feel both points are important. The overall flow and design of the Game Center screens is hard to use for users. It’s so hard that we’re currently exploring having adding a first timer tutorial on how to use the menus, and that’s not right. Apple can do better.

Once you get to the list of Game Center friends to invite to a game you are presented with a list of all your friends with no clear indication if they have the game you are also playing. The list should be sorted or allow straight filtered out if they don’t have the game you want to play them in.

This is almost a bug and an enhancement request, it’s a fine line really. When you get turn based notifications they come across as from Game Center, not the game you are playing, but if you have Game Center turned off in Notification Center then you wont get these notifications at all. We see this a lot with players not sure why they aren’t being told it’s their turn if Words Play is enabled in Notification Center.

This one is really unfortunate. We found this bug a while ago, and it still isn’t fixed. Basically in the turn data that Game Center sends back and forth between users there is a lastTurnDate. This date is being set by the DEVICE not the server. So because we can’t trust this date to be accurate, because users can change their devices dates, it’s pretty much useless when comparing if a turn is new or not.

When debugging game issues with customers it’d be super handy to check the server to see what data a user’s game is passing back and forth. There is no way to do this since Apple owns the servers, but they could provide us an interface to that turn data. We’d love them if they created that tool for us!

Let people who have linked Twitter find their Twitter friends on Game Center. And if Apple ever adds Facebook support to the OS, allow Facebook as well. Customers don’t understand why our game doesn’t do this because we can’t do this with Game Center as it stands today.

Communicating between Game Center users doesn’t exist, but on most game platforms (Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam, etc) there is a way to send your friends messages. This would be great feature to be built into Game Center as well and I’m sure almost all games would rather run this off of Apple’s infrastructure instead of rolling their own, and this would help spread Game Center adoption across games even more so than Turn by Turn.

Why Netflix Just Made Me A Redbox Customer

Earlier this morning Engadget posted a story about a possible price increase coming to Netflix this week that started a bit of a stir online. Hours later Netflix broke the news on their blog and soon after updated pricing on their website too. The prices are effective immediately for new customers, and starting after September 1st for existing customers. You can see the new pricing below:

Click To Enlarge

What Netflix is doing is basically making their DVD and Streaming business into two different services with an equal cost. For users who are on their newer DVD or steaming only plans, there is no change. But for those customers, like me, who are on the legacy DVD plans that had included free streaming, there is a significant price increase. My plan which includes Blu-rays is changing from $12/mo to $18/mo, that’s a 50% price increase for nothing new!

I’ve been using Netflix on and off since their launch. Over the past few years I’ve started to use the streaming service the most and considered the discs as an extra perk. I knew about Redbox and never found a use for the service since Netflix was more valuable in my eyes. That is no longer the case.

My big problem with this is not the money, but rather the value of the service. Netflix knows how often I do NOT rent discs anymore. I have rented 17 discs in the last 7 months, that’s less than 3 discs a month. Twice this year I let a disc sit around for two weeks as well before I found time to watch it. When I was paying only $4 more for DVDs and Blu-rays over the $8 streaming plan, that made a lot of sense. But now they just increased that extra cost to $10 extra a month. Renting on average 3 Blu-ray discs a month from Netflix isn’t worth it anymore. I’ll be dropping down to Unlimited Streaming Only before the price change takes effect in September. Which means that’s $4 a month Netflix won’t be getting from this customer, and many others as well who will be doing the same from the sounds of it.

By switching to renting discs from Redbox I’ll likely save myself $75 a year. Instead of paying $10/mo extra to rent DVD and Blu-ray discs at my convenience from Netflix, I will instead pay $1.50 a night to rent a Blu-ray whenever I want to from Redbox. If I keep up with my average of 3 a month, I’ll be paying $4.50 a month in rental charges as long as I return them each night. Sure Redbox has less selection and late fees. The selection doesn’t matter to me because I’m usually renting new Blu-ray releases not available to Stream from Netflix. Redbox offers the same discs with the same 30 day delay that Netflix has, so no major loss there. I will likely rent far less than 3 a month now and instead just get a disc the day I want to watch it.

Redbox also became more attractive recently by adding video games to their boxes. I used to rent some games from my local Blockbuster, which is long since closed. Redbox just filled that void with closer locations and better pricing if I just want to try a game out or if I need an extra disc for a multiplayer game when I have friends over.

The other reason the Netflix DVD queue is less attactive to me going forward is also because Netflix is removing the DVD Queue from their public API in October. This means you can’t add movies to your DVD Queue from Netflix enabled apps. This means the app I developed, Leonard Maltin Movie Guide, or BitBQ’s excellent QueueUp Netflix app will have this one feature completely removed. Instead you will have to use their website to manage and update your DVD queue, thusly hobbling the service.

This would be a great time for Redbox to step up and offer a public API for their disc rental service that apps can tie into. Or a even a hook into launching their mobile apps for a specific title. Anyone from Redbox or Coinstar listening out there?