One month ago, we began publishing TestFlight previews of Xogot to those who signed up for our private preview.   If you’re not already in the preview program, you can sign up to join the Xogot TestFlight here.

I had been dragging my feet on publishing this release to squeeze as many bug fixes as I could, thinking “People are going to run into these right away” and “I really do not need 100 bug reports of the same issue.”

I thought I could just use Xcode crash reports to track any major problems, but I soon found out that while the information is good, the tools around it are not great, and I needed something better, so I deployed Firebase Crashlytics (if you want some details, check this mastodon thread).

Since the first preview release, we fixed some 50-crash inducing bugs and fixed hundreds of papercuts.   It has been a rough month.   We initially went from “This thing is nowhere near ready to ship” to yesterday thinking “This can definitely be in shape by spring.”

During these few short weeks, our very active and engaged Xogot preview community have reported hundreds of issues driving us to push more than 40 new builds addressing hundreds of paper cuts, major bugs, and missing features.  Today’s release looks very different than the initial preview.

You can check the preview release notes for a comprehensive list of issues we’ve addressed, but in this post we’ll take a look at a few highlights. 

Our Focus

For the last four weeks, we have prioritized crashes, bugs, and the fundamental parts of the app: Making sure that we are delivering a great iPad touch experience.   

Even after all these years shipping software, I was once again surprised that the issues that I thought were important and the issues that were important to our users were different.   When planning software releases, I often postpone important features for a later time, and I colloquially call it “2.0 features”, and I use that to focus my attention.

The testing proved that some of these 2.0 features were must-haves for a 1.0 release. Things like allowing users to pick a different location to store their files (see below) and some experiences that we did not realize got so much traffic (like the SpriteSheet editor) had to be rewritten.

There are some features that I desperately want in the 1.0 release, but the sheer size of them are going to force me to postpone these for 2.0.  Those include the TileMap plugin, and the Animation Plugin - they both work, but they are not yet iPad-optimized experiences.

If you have followed this blog for the past year, you will know that we have often had to remove Godot UI features to give us some breathing room - some of those had to come back, due to just how popular they were.

Major Changes

Improved gesture support

We made several improvements to better support touch input in the 2D and 3D viewports, including better support for 2-finger gestures, panning and zooming at the same time, and performing rotation, scaling, and resizing transformations.

iCloud and External USB File Locations

By popular demand, we now support saving your projects to a location of your choice, so that you are not limited to saving files into your iPad’s limited storage space, you can now choose an external USB drive, iCloud drive or any other external locations.

Other Important Changes

• Save All and autosave were not actually saving scripts in many instances.
• Copying directory hierarchies from Files.app into Xogot preserves the hierarchy.
• Various missing signal bugs have been fixed
• Bluetooth controller support
  • We had a long-standing known issue where bluetooth controllers would not work unless you connected them after the game was running - meaning that for most Xogotistas bluetooth controller support effectively just wasn’t there
• More keyboard shortcuts

Preview Community

We have added over 1,000 users to Testflight, with the majority of those having installed the beta and tried it. We currently have over 60 active users every day running an average session of about 37 minutes.

We also have a great community growing in the Xogot Discord server where we are collecting feedback and bug reports which we turn into issues in our public bug tracker.

Here are a few projects in Xogot that the community has shared:

Lastly, if you haven't had a chance to run Xogot yourself, GameFromScratch published a great review that walks through many Xogot features in an early preview build: