Programmer, James Munro, talks about the process of continually updating and improving an iPhone game.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been hard at work on updating and improving Gobang Social. Last week we submitted v1.6 and we’re now developing v1.7, the seventh consecutive update to the game. We’ve had lots of useful feedback and we’re well aware of several improvements that users are requesting.

Due to popular demand, the main new feature in v1.7 will be the ability to login and invite your friends via email. We understand that some people simply aren’t comfortable using their Facebook account to authenticate with our server, so we’re providing this additional option. Logging in by email will still allow you to play random opponents, you won’t be missing out on any features. It is also likely that we will add other login options in the future.

Implementing email login support has not been a trivial task. There are several headaches involved in architecting such a feature in order to ensure that everybody has a smooth and reliable user experience. On the surface it sounds simple, but we want to ensure that we have all possibilities covered. We initially focused on Facebook Connect authentication in order to sidestep some of these issues and get a product to the store faster. However, we’re now committed to adding email support to Gobang Social and all of our future games which share the same core technology.

There are several additional usability improvements that we have on our roadmap. We have these in mind for the eighth update, and will likely include additions like being made aware of the winning move made in a match, so that it doesn’t silently slip into the ended games.

Behind the scenes we’ve been working on improving the performance of our game server, especially with regards to people who are playing in our competition. Some of our players have over 1000 Gobang Social matches, which exceeds our initial expectations. Thanks to these loyal players we have been made aware of different ways that we can improve the performance and response time of the server. We aim to continually improve this over time as our user base grows.

Please keep your feedback coming in and keep your eyes peeled for v1.7 of Gobang Social!