May | 2011 | Random Acts of Dev...

It’s been a pretty interesting ride so far now that Zombie Room AR has launched on the Android Market.

Let’s start with the Pros:

I’ve been listed by Unity as “The most awesome Augmented Reality Game” and showcased in their May 2011 Newsletter – which is way more than I ever imagined.
The game is also being showcased by Qualcomm themselves, which is also far more than I ever expectd.
I’m now installed in over 20 countries by thousands of users! Once again – totally unexpected!

Since life isn’t always a bowl of cherries, let’s talk about the Cons:

Android Market users are trigger happy with the 1 Star rating. In their defense, the game didn’t work for them – so the bashed it… but if they had only read the description they would have seen why…
Game doesn’t work on Android 3.x yet… but the market let’s them download and install it… which then doesn’t work… when leads to a 1 star rating. (This is Qualcomm’s SDK that doesn’t work – Unity works great… which is why the Market lets the download occur)
No ability to troubleshoot Qualcomm issues. I’ll explain further below.

The Nexus S has been a pain in my neck since launch. The main issue is that my game loves to crash on the Nexus S due to issues on Qualcomm’s side of the house. From what I can tell, after the game loads it calls home to Qualcomm to get a ‘device profile’ template from their servers. Once it has this template it loads all the magic, which is where the Nexus S chokes and crashes. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it on my side of things, so I’m helpless and continue to get 1 star ratings from Nexus S users… and let’s remember, a 1 star rating cancels out a 5 star rating… so these things add up and really start to suck.