Hello everyone!

I promised it, and I managed to get it done. The iOS TestFlight is now out!

Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone who has donated to the Kickstarter. This would not be possible without their support. If you haven't donated to the Kickstarter, please think about doing so here. You contribution helps drive the project forward.

Anyways, I've managed to DicTater onto iOS via TestFlight. Take the link, in all of its glory:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/TNRwlGKy

And Android is still available by joining the Google Group:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dictater-alpha

Getting this was a slightly more difficult than I actually thought it would be.

I had ordered a refurbished macbook off of Amazon because that would let me publish to iOS. Fortunately, the Kickstarter should be able to help with this expense and few other purchases.

I assumed that it would be a simple transition because Unity would take care of most of the issues. I assumed Unity was a capable engine that wouldn't have a project-killing rendering error built-in as default. I was wrong.

Using my new macbook and about an hour of building, I finaly had a build. Unfortunately I didn't have an iOS phone at the time, and it worked on previous simulators, so I just uploaded the build to the cloud to see if any of my friends could download it.

They could download it. They just couldn't do anything.

I found out any builds to iOS would cause the game to be a purple screen simulator. Here, I'm using my roommate's phone to test. (BTW, thanks for letting me steal your phone for HOURS, Ian)

At the very least it looked like the DicTater icon on the homescreen, and you could drag it around. It was further progress than what there was earlier. Just nothing I could publish to the public.

Ian needed his phone eventually, so I couldn't keep on testing, but I did have the power of google. Apparently Unity has some issues with building on iOS Catalina in their current version (2019.2 at the time of writing).

iOS likes to use Metal to draw images onto screens. Think of it as a bunch of code to do math to render images.

Metal is more efficient than OpenGL, which is why it is used by default. Unfortunately Unity can't build to it properly, hence the purple screen simulator, which is why I had to switch to OpenGL3 (OpenGL2 also fails, causing purple AND memory leaks).

While there may be some performance issues with this switch, it shouldn't be anything major.

Eventually after many hours of waiting, Apple allowed my application to go through TestFlight. And you should all be able to play it!

Link is here, if you missed it. =)

Thanks again for all of your support.

-Jeremy

This post was originally posted on DicTater's website here:

https://dictatergame.com/dev-blog/ios-testflight-released