What makes me feel extra sucky about all this is that the money I have been making from Hearts Net has been steadily growing, despite my neglect. I’m not going to quote actual numbers, because that would sound like bragging, but. Pretty close to covering my rent every month. That’s substantial. So I feel like I owe something to you fine folks for stuffing so much money in my pockets, and I am forever planning to get a new version into the store, but I haven’t done so yet. Boy, do I suck.

I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to, though. I’ve mostly got the game updated for iPhone4. I know the current graphics look bad on a Retina Display, so I’ve fixed most of them. I don’t think I’m going to be able to update the card faces, though. I’ve explored various avenues, and I don’t see how I can get decent high-res cards without paying at least a thousand bucks. That’s steep, even given the substantial amount of money I’m making from the game. If any of you out there are graphics pros, and you can find a way to get me high-res playing card graphics for 500 bucks or less, I am all ears. Doesn’t have to be exclusive card graphics, either. If you sold them non-exclusively to somebody else first, I’m cool with that.

I have been reading about Apple’s new Game Center feature with interest. I’ve so far avoided adding across-the-internet play, because that would involve running my own server, and I don’t want to do that. It’s an ongoing expense, I would have to police the server for abuse, I would be the system administrator, and so on. But it looks like Apple is willing to do all that for me, including passing network messages between players. If that’s true, Game Center would save me a great deal of time, money, and grief, so I will be using it.

Finally, here’s a very nice video review that this guy did for my game: ThatSnazzyiPhoneGuy reviews Hearts Net. I’ve been aware of this for months. In fact, I even gave this guy a promo code for the game. But I just couldn’t watch it. My feeling is: hey, I know which parts of my game suck, I don’t need other people to tell me that. My friend Steph said it was a very positive review, but I still never got around to watching it, until tonight. She’s right, it’s very positive. The review was worth the promo code (heh).

Here’s some answers to the review. He seems to imply that you need a network connection to read the game’s help text. Not true! The HTML help files are stored locally in the app. Also, he wonders why I added the AutoPlay feature. The reason is that it makes the game a whole lot easier to test. Notice all the times he has to stop concentrating on what he’s talking about to play a card and keep the review going? Now imagine me, by myself, trying to test millions of card plays in network games.

So, I’ll be working on new features and more devious player robots in the future. Might not be for awhile, because I recently started a new full-time job which is taking most of my time. But the game is still very much on the list of my current projects.

You still can’t play a game all the way through, though. This app is just a no-cost way to preview the features available in Hearts Net.

I’ve made yet another attempt to fix the two big bugs people have been reporting, and I have reason to believe I actually got them this time. So, everybody upgrade, and let me know how it works out.

Pretty soon I’ll be releasing a new version of Hearts Solo that is also iPad-capable. It still won’t let you get all the way through a game though, sorry. It’s just for demonstration purposes.

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, some players have reported that the game counts don’t always update correctly. I’m told the numbers are sometimes smaller than they should be. I haven’t been able to get a good handle on this, because the people experiencing the problem tend to be less technical, and aren’t able to give very detailed feedback. But I’ve finally found a player who was willing to perform a lengthy and involved experiment, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it nailed down.

I asked this person to exit the program back to the home screen at the end of every game. After doing this for several days, he says that this does indeed fix the problem for him. So in the next version of the program, I’ll make it save its game counts at the end of every game, so you won’t have to do it manually. In the meantime, if the game counts are really important to you, you can do what this person did, and exit the program at the end of every game.

I’d like to say I’ll submit a new version of Hearts Net to the store right away, but I’m super busy working on the iPad version right now. Soon, though.

Here’s the first one. Some people say they are still getting the “stuck robot” problem. This is when you’re playing Hearts Net and it’s all working fine, then it’s time for one of the robots to play a card, but it doesn’t. Nothing happens, the game is stuck. You can exit the game to the home screen and come back, and it’s still stuck.

I’ve gotten maybe ten reports of this bug in the last week or two. I’ve told those people the “simple” fix, and urged them to help me with the harder fix, but nobody has ever written back! I am positive I could fix this if just one person would send me her game state, so I could use it to analyze the problem. Surely one of you is willing to help?

Here’s how you do that. Play the game until it gets “stuck,” and the robots won’t play. Go to the “Settings” tab, then go all the way to the bottom, and press “Upload State.” That takes you to another screen, where you must press the “Upload State” button. Finally, send me an email to allen.brunson@gmail.com so I can ask you a few follow-up questions.

I suppose it could be that everybody who has experienced this problem is still using an older version of Hearts Net? If this happens to you and your Settings view does not have an “Upload State” button, then you are not using the latest version of the program. In that case, then yes, I am already aware that older versions had this problem. I only need to hear from people who are using the latest version.

Second bug: some people say that the number of games played and games won is sometimes inconsistent. For example, one time you’re playing and the game says you’ve played 30 games and won 18 of them, then the next time you look, it says you’ve played 20 games and won 5, or something like that. This bug is trickier. I don’t think I can solve this one with the “Upload State” trick, for complicated reasons that you don’t want to hear about (heh). But if you can make this happen “at will,” every time, and explain to me how you did it, then I could fix this one, too. For example, it could be that the game is crashing for some reason, and so it doesn’t get to save its state to disk. Then, the next time you start it, you’re looking at the game state as it existed the last time it was able to save its state. Or something like that. So if you can make this bug occur “at will,” let me know how to do it too, so I can fix it.

Let’s say you see the robots make a card play that you consider poor. Right after it happens, use the state upload feature to send your current game to me. Then send me an email to describe what was happening in the hand, and how you think the robots should have handled the situation. If I agree with you, and it’s not too hard to fix, I’ll add that improvement in a later version of the game.

I tried to resolve the “shy robot” problem, described in an an earlier blog post. I can’t be sure I’ve fixed it, because that situation never happens to me personally. Perhaps somebody will let me know if I succeeded?

If you upgrade to 2.1.1 but find that games still get “stuck” sometimes, can you use the new “State Upload” feature to send me your game state? And then send me an email, to let me know who you are. When I get a state data upload to my website, I don’t know anything at all about who sent it, other than the UDID from their device. It’s nice to have a little more context.

Also, brand-new feature: You can now replay a hand from the beginning if you want. The first of many gameplay variations I’ll be adding.

The short-term fix is easy. The game isn’t really locked up. Go to Settings, and press “New Single-Player Game.” This starts a new game, which won’t be stuck.

The long-term fix, of course, is that I have to find and fix the bug. I have an idea what it might be, but I’m not 100-percent sure. I’ve applied my hoped-for fix to the code, and I’ll submit it to the App Store pretty soon.

The reason that I haven’t already submitted this is that I’m also working on another feature, which I guess I’m calling “state upload.” The card game engine is capable of saving all its state to a block of memory about 3.5k in size. This is the mechanism used when the game saves its state between runs, so it can start up right where it left off. An interesting side effect is that, if I have the saved state file from your game, I can recreate whatever situation you might be experiencing in my local development environment.

Everyone is telling me that the “shy robot” problem persists between runs of the program. That means that the screwed-up situation is definitely stored in the game’s state data. By examining state data from somebody whose game is in “shy robot” mode, I should be able to exactly duplicate the problem locally. Any programmer can tell you that a bug with a reproducible test case is a bug that’s easily fixed. So if my first try for fixing this bug doesn’t work, it’s almost a certainty that I can fix it by examining the state data from somebody who’s experiencing the problem.

There’s another reason why I think this is a feature worth spending development time on. I now have several players who are very opinionated about perceived shortcomings in my Hearts-playing robots. They email me with very detailed situations where they had this set of cards, and a certain robot had that set of cards, and then the robot played this particular card, and oh boy that is dumb.

If I start with nothing but an explanation like that, it could take me days to determine the particular behavior that player is talking about. I’d only have about 60 percent confidence that I could ever figure it out. But if that player can send me his game state, I can reproduce the exact scenario he is talking about with basically no effort whatsoever.

I am fairly baffled that a silly card game is now my Flagship Product. But if lots of people are going to take it seriously, I guess I will too.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I got from a satisfied player, named John Maldaner:

Last night I played Hearts Net via wifi with my wife. Game setup was exactly as described in the instructions. No problem. There is a slight delay when you pass and accept passed cards. There is a slight delay to go to the Next Hand. Both of these delays make sense since one or more opponents are real people now. But, the delays can confuse you at first just because you’ve played the single-player version so much. Game play is perfect. We had no issues with the flow of the game. Nothing unusual happened. Except that I lost the game! LOL!

Regarding the robots and shooting the moon. The robots are better at stopping moon shots. They intercede early. I will give this some study and report back. I had gotten pretty good at shooting the moon in Hearts Solo. The real key, there, was playing low cards early in a manner that seemed innocent. I could pretty easily lull the robots into playing early high hearts. That is the key. They would usually play their high hearts first, sometimes even in an obvious situation where playing a lower heart would have set me. I have not experimented enough in Hearts Net to give you a fair comparison. I will do so.

I would be interested in the demographics of folks that have purchased your game. I am 56 and played hearts (and spades) extensively, especially in college. I do like card games in general, but there is something comfortable about playing the games you grew up with. For that reason, Hearts and Spades are the only card apps I have purchased and play. I play both daily, at least a couple games each.

I have not experimented with other Hearts games available. I have looked at some, but it’s never gone past looking. Why? Well, most look gimmicky. Some designers have chosen to concentrate on elaborate board designs or adding in extraneous character enhancements that, to me, just take away from the game itself. Your game is true to the game. I especially like the two-touch approach to choosing a card to play. I know I can change that to one-touch. But, I don’t because at times I want to change my mind. Also, the two-touch method helps me make sure I touched the right card. This sounds simple, but other card games have not embraced that. I like your method the best.