This Week At Hyperoid, we are still facing difficulties.

TL;DR

Alright, before we get into this post, I’m just going to say that it’s going to be a short one. But I’ll give the TL;DR here if you want it. This week I am still working on getting an iOS build up and running, I seem to be getting closer but the build still doesn’t work. Also, Google support still has yet to reply to me on my verification issues.

iOS Build Stability

In the last TWAH article it was stated that demo build stability was being worked on and that it was halfway there. The Android build was up and running but the iOS build was not. There are still complications with the iOS build. I feel like the last TWAH article did not explain the workflow of how the demo builds were made. So I will explain how that works here. Get ready for some slight technical talk…

PROJECT ERIS is being developed on the Unity engine. The reason I chose this engine is because it was an engine I was most familiar with beforehand. This project can pretty much have one code/asset base and I can build for multiple platforms that Unity supports (and it supports a lot of platforms thankfully). I want you to keep in mind that I am developing this project on a Windows computer. Why is that important? We will get to that in just a bit. Now that the basics have been explained let’s continue on…

When building the demo for Android, I can connect up an Android device straight to my computer. I literally hit a button that says ‘Build and Run‘ in the Unity editor, choose an output folder and the game is built and opened up on the Android device that is connected (provided there are no build errors of course). From there I can test the demo straight on the Android device itself.

However, for iOS it has some extra steps. On a Windows computer you can build for iOS, however you can’t run it to a connected iOS device if you had one. Instead, you have to use a Mac computer in order to do this and it requires additional steps which I will explain. Once I have built the demo on a Mac computer (provided there are no build errors of course), I have to open up a separate application called Xcode (which is only available on Mac computers). I won’t go into detail about what Xcode is, but basically this application let’s me build and run straight to iOS devices for testing. After a successful build in the Unity editor, it generates an Xcode project that needs to be opened up in Xcode. From there I have to build the demo in this application as well in order to run and test it on an iOS device (provided there are no build errors again of course).

Now as I said, I am only developing on a Windows computer for this project. I do not have a Mac computer to do all of this and I definitely did not want to spend an expensive amount of money on this equipment. So how did I get around this? Well I tried to use a virtual machine that was able to run macOS on my Windows computer. Unity also managed to create an iOS build, but when building in Xcode, there were many more errors that I am still trying to get my head around. I think it also doesn’t help that I have an out of date macOS version that I am using to get this iOS build working. Again, I literally setup all of this quickly in order to try and get a working iOS build.

I should have anticipated these obstacles earlier on in development but, this is my first time releasing something for mobile devices. I’ll note this setback for any future endeavours.

Closing Thoughts

I have tried contacting Google support about the verification issues about the developer account. They have yet to reply to me on this. Hopefully this issue will be resolved by next week.

There have been a lot of setbacks recently, but I am slowly finding solutions. I may have to make compromises here and there but remain hopeful that this demo can be seen by as many of you as possible. Thank you for staying with me so far.

“This is Hyper, signing out.”

Hyper