Some time last week we stumbled across AppRelief.  We thought it was such a great idea we decided to join up. We signed up for the period of our Australia Day Sale (Jan 20-26), donating 100% of our net profit during that time.

We’ve just received the daily figures from apple for the period, and after operating expenses, we will be contributing $1,697! We don’t pay ourselves (yet), so this represents quite a hefty commitment on our part.

Our most sincere thanks go to all the players of Train Conductor, in particular those in Australia, Italy, USA, Japan and Great Britain who represent the largest contributors.

Distribution of sales by country

Extra kudos goes to Japan and Italy, sales of Train Conductor jumped significantly in those regions during the donation period. (And thanks to AppViz for the PieGraph)

We’re still trying to decide between whether to donate to the RedCross or MSF or perhaps another worthy source. We won’t be receiving the cheque from Apple for the sales until the end of Feburary. If anyone can help suggest a worthy charity, please let us know before then by leaving a comment.

Update: We have chosen to give the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia. The full amount of $1,697 has been donated and will go to helping MSF’s efforts around the world and in Haiti. Thanks to everyone for helping us to do this!

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Train Conductor is looking great and it’s thanks to the efforts of Logan Dowell, Derek Pritchard, Joe Gatling and Jarrod Andersen, our nationally distributed art team.

Logan Dowell and Derek Pritchard were selected to join the Agent ranks as part of the QANTM college internship program. together they developed the level backdrops of Sydney and Melbourne, created numerous train models, and designed the entire menu art style. They also collaborated together to produce the wonderful loading screens and game website, amongst many other things.  The pending release of Train Conductor marks their explosive debut into the games industry.

Joe Gatling, a long standing friend and fellow university graduate member of our sif90 roots, initially set the style of the game seen in the early teaser images, and they became the defacto style guide for the rest of the development process.

Jarrod Andersen connected with The Agents through a serendipitous reddit post in July 2009. Jarrod developed the Mr. Train Conductor character and set the initial train model style, as well as the scary Skull Train.

We are tremendously grateful for their assistance and the beauty of the final game is a tribute to their efforts.

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So I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the game and general development. I thought I’d post them here to help anyone in the same boat. So without further ado…

D: I don’t have an iPhone! Where are the screenshots and videos?

Agent Matt: You can find screen shots and videos on the Dolphin Hero website.

A: Downloaded, played, enjoyed – hope this is the start of amazing things to come! How did you find the submission process?

Agent Matt: Approval was a breeze.  The only thing that caught us out was the display icon, we had a  small one for the iPhone, but didn’t realise we also needed a 512×512 version, and our designer/artist was in Italy, so we just had to size up the small one.  We had also got to the end without some proper screen shots, I wasn’t looking forward to cropping up snapshots of the simulator, but we found out you can take them on the device by hitting lock+home quickly.

A: Nice work. I’ve been making my own game using C++ so far, we’ve barely touched Objective C. Which one did you use?

Agent Matt: We started out with Objective-C because we thought we should at least give it a go first. Agent duski ended up being a mix of the two. We’ve since thrown away all that code and moved to C++, which is what we will be using for the rest of our games.

M: General feelings working with the iPhone, any other points?

Agent Matt: iPhone dev has been pretty smooth sailing.  It was a bit scary to find that what runs at 60fps on the ipod Touch is about 30fps on the iPhone…  But as long as you do all your dev on the phone, it should be fine.

Also try and support 2.0. We were tossing up whether or not we would bother, and ended up releasing for 2.2.1, at least 2 of our friends had to upgrade their phone just to play our game, so you’re definately cutting some of the market out (we assumed that people not on 2.2.1 werent buying apps anyway – don’t assume).

A: The music is great! Where did you get it from?

Agent Matt: Agent Simon’s brother (Joel Joslin) is a professional musician who has been writing and performing for more than a decade  He wrote all the music for us, and provided the sound fx.

M: I’m looking into putting sounds into my own iPhone app. Should I use CoreAudio or openAL?

Agent Matt: We used openAl for all our soundfx. and GBMusicTrack for music (copy,paste,edit from http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15280 )  We originally were using core audio, but thought we’d get more control in OpenAL. Also core audio didnt seem to work on iPhone 3.0, we didn’t look into why.

A: I really want to develop my own game, but I can’t find the time.

Agent Matt: You just have to do it, it’s a fantastic feeling having a game in the store.  It’s also the first game released for me, so doubly exciting

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