Hey everyone. I mentioned yesterday that I would keep you all posted on what will happen with Ballzerk and Megatoxic in general. Now that I've had some more time to process everything and look into the situation with Game Maker Studio, the situation is not as dire as I was making it out to be yesterday. Frankly, there's a lot going on currently with myself and I felt like there wasn't a lot I can do with all these factors coming into play.
So without further due, here is the rundown:
- The license I had purchased for Game Maker Studio 2 will still continue to be valid for as long as YoYoGames continues developing and supporting it. The real worries won't actually happen until Game Maker Studio 3.x. This is good news for me, because I can have A LOT more time to familiarize myself with Game Maker Studio's new licensing system and gradually make the switchover to Game Maker Studio 3 if I so desire. Frankly, I would prefer to stay on Game Maker Studio until at least 2 of the 3 projects I'm working on are finished.
- Ballzerk has officially been taken down from the App Store. I was completely expecting this, and it happened as I mentioned it would. However, now that I know my current Game Maker license will continue to work as it has for the past 3 years, I'm actually reconsidering releasing a new update for Ballzerk to comply with Apple's updated guidelines.
Keep in mind though, this is still a tedious process to go through-- and I've only done it once. How? Well, I basically test the hell out of Ballzerk to make sure it worked really well on iOS before I released it. It's actually pretty amazing-- one build of Ballzerk was ever released on iOS in the 3 years it's been on the App Store. Because of the difficulty of releasing an iOS app, I'm going to make one attempt at it, and if it gets rejected then I'm done with Ballzerk on iOS for real. Trust me-- it was horrendous the first time around. That's exactly why I never bothered trying to do any updates for Ballzerk on iOS. Most of the updates I've been doing were actually for the Android port.
So this is interesting, and frankly it's not all bad news. Megatoxic will continue on, so we can all relax with that (I was a bit flustered last night). Worst case scenario that happens will be that Ballzerk will be taken down from the iOS App Store for good, and Android will actually get a nice update for the game (I was planning on another update to Ballzerk in general, completely unrelated to this situation). My other games will continue to be developed over the course of time, and I might bring one of them over to Unity. I still believe Unity is a viable option to consider for one of my projects. The point is, I have options to take and I think I can sort through this.
To conclude, I apologize if I alarmed anyone, and I apologize for potentially blowing this out of proportion last night. I'm thinking we could all use some good news here, so next month I'm probably going to release a new trailer for one of those unannounced projects. Stay tuned. ;)
