Well, that was exciting. Apparently I tagged the wrong version for my first release, and managed to send Apple a copy of the game as it existed right before I fixed all of the bugs. Ok, right before I fixed some of the bugs. But still.

Deeply embarrassing.

At any rate, I’ve got it all sorted out now and a smoother, much less crash-tastic version of the game is currently writhing its (slow) way through Apple’s review process. In addition to not ceasing to scroll after loading from save (!) and not crashing approximately every 7.8 minutes (!!), this update adds a couple new features:

• Autosave The game now autosaves every 20 turns. If you crash or otherwise quit without saving, you’ll be prompted to resume your autosaved game when you restart. The autosave slot works just like regular saves, so you can always load it later, or load it immediately and save it to another slot for safekeeping.
• Fleet Management Finally, you can move ships between fleets, combining existing fleets into one or splitting them apart. Enter the fleet management screen by double-tapping a system; if you don’t own the system you’ll be taken there immediately, otherwise tap the ‘Fleet Management’ button in the upper-right of the build queue screen.
• Mute Don’t like the music? Want to run the game with less memory overhead? You can now disable the audio system under options.

All that, plus a ton of bugfixes, patched memory leaks, and general slickification. It’s looking better now, folks. We’re good to go.

Distant Star is live on the App Store! Go give it a play and tell me what you think.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to go celebrate — where ‘celebrate’ means ‘add Gamecenter integration.’

Lots of progress on Distant Star — the biggest change is that I’ve added a tutorial, which was by far the most-requested feature the beta testers asked for. The map screen is a lot more informative now, too: fleets display their ETA and size (and, if you tap them, their composition), and the artwork for systems has been updated (as a system grows more habitable it looks increasingly Earthlike). That, plus a bunch of little bugfixes and minor improvements (AI is more aggressive, lots of re-balancing, a little more hand-holding in the interface design) — in fact, everything else that was left on my pre-release checklist. So, on that note:

Distant Star is off to Apple for review. Hurrah!