Xcode

Gem Heroes has successfully been built for iOS and sent off to be reviewed by Apple. There were many technical problems, as expected. In my experience distributing an app for the Apple App Store is about 20 times harder than distributing for Google Play.

Unity does not actually build the iOS app. It instead just creates an Xcode project to continue to build on a Mac. I rent one in the cloud, conveniently through a browser. It actually is pretty remarkable; I get to use the latest versions of Mac operating system without owning a Mac or upgrading the operating system.

The build settings are extraordinarily sensitive, and the errors tend to be vague and seemingly unrelated to the actual solutions.

Fail.

Fail.

The first time I added an incompatible framework which turned out to be unnecessary anyways. The second time I thought I had to change permission settings with a chmod command on a framework, but the solution was to change it from embedded to dynamically linked.

Then there were the usual certificate and provisioning problems. Apple has improved this by providing the option to automate it, but I still had to change a certificate manually when I submitted the build. Strange.

This is some really esoteric stuff. It took a lot of Googling and trial-and-error.

But I got it finished, and now I can resume progress on the new zombie game which I find to be much more interesting.