JPS Grooves

*sighs
let’s get you up to speed.
I have parked SnowCone MathFest Simulator for the moment. It’s a wonderful experiment so far, but has a ton and I mean a ton of work left to do.
I started playing guitar more, bought a loop pedal, am playing a few gigs here and there and life is good. I could reflect daily about how much better other guitarists are than me, but also about how much fun and joy playing music brings me, so why would I stop?

Same thoughts with #gamedev.

I have this perfect project, 8+ months in the making, a ton of feedback and I thin I just worked on it so long that I couldn’t bear to stay with it for another second. That all changed today.

I picked SnowCone MathFest back up and have made the decision to make it BETTER. I started thinking about all the things I could do and the first think that stuck out was an actual error in QuickServe mode that I just couldn’t let stay. So I fixed that.

Then I’m like, shiiiid, I might as well try to fix this big issue with the iOS release where the music wouldn’t consistently start/restart or stop when users preferred music played.

I’m proud to say, after an evening of pretty intense AI prompting, I was able to redo the entire app from .ambient capacitor transfer structure that was crippling iOS functionality, over to native sound coded tracks that work more like it does if I was building this thing directly from unity.

So that’s the lesson. I tried to make a new app, paused it, and learned how to word my frustration to Patch in order to help us figure out a fix. ChatGPT is def running on its best models yet, but this was no one and done prompting experience.

I used AI to refactor files in two different repos: xcode/swift and the local files that built the webpage. It wasn’t what I would call easy, but it is a fix.

I can tell my original SCMF work flow is Waaaay off. I updated this whole thing to appstoreconnect and forgot to update my little in game notes and feature updates.

Patch makes it sound like more than it is, but I guess it was a busy evening actually:

• Native iOS audio playback system added iPhone silent switch now respected
• User music app support added: Apple Music / Spotify can override SCMF music
• SCMF music now parks when user music is playing SCMF music resumes when user music stops
• Gameplay SFX continue while user music plays
• Unified mute behavior improved across modes
• Camping Games mute button fixed QuickServe SFX routed through native audio
• Music Tab upgraded into a real media player Music Tab play / pause fixed
• Music Tab scrubber now seeks through songs
• Music Tab timer/progress behavior improved
• Native audio state bridge added between Swift and JavaScript
• App background / foreground audio behavior improved
• stopPropagation crash patched with safer event handling

Pretty impressive!

The way I see it now: You can listen to YOUR music in SCMF now. I was very concerned about releasing my own music, and released my stranglehold on the music in the app more and more, for different reasons, as the dev process went on. tonight was about flow. When users play this game on their iPhone now, they can play it with their own music, kind of solving that (really old) debate about xbox having in game user music over the dev created tracks.

My tracks are cool, and if you dont want them you can hit mute, if you want music other then them, you can do that as well now. Honestly, this will help my dev process as I kind of get tired of listening to the same songs over and over. (I even thought of adding a couple new tunes).

If you bought the app, I’m back! I’m working on it!

NEw tunes possible.
new backgrounds for sure!!
themes and atmospheric additions are welcome
all mode ballancing and improvements
story mode could be more vivid..not sure
Grampy P needs buttons I think..idk..gonna make him smarter somehow…he deserves better.
camping games might need some new stuff to give it purpose.
updates all around!

I’m giving myself 2 months to mess around. see what I can do in a teacher’s free time. which for me, is a lot of time. If tonight is any indication, I just need to get my workflow and headspace going again and I’ll be able to modify instead of create in some cases. I’m looking forward to this revisionary process.

The first step in the right direction has been decided and moved.

I’m sorry browser version, I love you (dramatic) but I’m focusing on the iOS paid version rn.

Buy HERE

SCMF, getting another run in 2026! Getting it Ready for 2027! (you may lose a background…..)

Later y’all!