New Year Paraphernalia

Each year, my brother and I spend the new year's eve building a new album to release. Also, I've been trying to get in the habit of releasing a little interactive solstice / new year card around the same time. So here they are.

Game

This year's game is a quick implementation of a puzzle interaction involving moving blocks around. The opening animation explains it better than I could:

Play

Album

This year's is called "Sassy Bunny" and you can listen to it right now:

Some highlights: Weird To Me -- a classic one-take Jimike song; Undone -- all sorts of interesting sounds in here; Intro -- really energetic track. Some lowlights: weird mixing in Great In The Future; She -- a track that is perhaps too mellow.

We are starting to accumulate a fair bit of audio gear. This year's album involved two guitars, a banjo, a Monotribe, three mics, and two different midi control devices -- a keyboard and a Push (run through a custom script to make it nice for use in Reason).

As always, expect Spotify links when we get around to pushing the files to our distributer.

Why Rainbow fails on iOS 8

Last week, I received a disturbing bug report from an iOS 8 user: Rainbow, it seems, wasn't properly saving any game state. So, I sat down to see what the problem was.

The culprit seems to be the helper function user_data_dir, which is responsible for figuring out where to store data files for the game:

string user_data_dir(string const &app_name)
    /* ... */
    #elif defined(IOS)
    ret = "../Documents";
    #elif defined(ANDROID)
    /* ... */
    return ret;
}

Hmm. A hardcoded path. That seems brittle.

Looking up user data paths and iOS 8, I came across a tech note which pretty succinctly explained the situation. Basically, the Documents directory is no longer a sibling of the application, so must be requested using a (ObjC) call, which I ended up dumping into a different (compiled-as-ObjC++) file:

std::string documents_directory() {
    return [[[[[NSFileManager defaultManager] URLsForDirectory:NSDocumentDirectory inDomains:NSUserDomainMask] lastObject] path] UTF8String];
}

And that seems to have done it. Expect a 1.5.2 version of Rainbow to appear soon.