I have some questions regarding Apple's rules...

[psj3809]

Originally Posted by RoanHorse

Alright, allow me to explain myself. I want to make a game about 'decking'. You know, hacking into stuff, the incredibly incorrect portrayal of hacking that the movies have been peddling since computers became a thing in the average American's home.
>photos
I want to do something like The Heist, where the player is contacted by an NPC. Specifically, I need a picture of the player for immersion. Taking it without their consent makes it a very surreal experience. The picture would not be uploaded to anywhere.
>crashing
Immersion. The first time you (inevitably) fail, the application would crash. When you open it up again, you'd be contacted by an NPC expressing his/her worry over you 'going offline suddenly'.

I can understand now a 'bit' better about what you want to do but i'm sure you couldnt purposely crash an app. If that happened to me i probably would think 'forget this then' and move onto the next app. Surely you can 'simulate' a fake crash.

A game in the 80's (Brian Bloodaxe) would pretend to reset the computer after it was loaded but it had a slight change in the text for the 'reset screen' so you wouldnt instantly think 'damn' and reset your computer and try again.

So i would do a 'pretend' reset but make it obvious its part of the game and dont make it too authentic or there'll be lots of people moaning to Apple about the app.

As for the photo its very well saying it wont go anywhere else but you hear so many nightmare stories of corrupt Android apps, granted this is Apple but it would make people paranoid. And anyway i'm certain Apple wouldnt let you do this. In everyone of my 600 apps i have on my ipod the games which have a 'picture' of the player are just cartoon/fake ones, none of them need to have the photo of the player.

A game back in the 80's (The Hacker) was great, not many instructions, you had to work out what to do. Something similar would be good but i wouldnt go so far to get photos of the user or purposely crash the app. 'Pretend' to crash the app and go to a standard homepage of an ipod/iphone.

[Pman]

I really hope apple wouldn't approve an app like this. A picture of my face without me knowing coming from some app developer I don't even know is creepy as all get out.

[RoanHorse]

Alright.
As far as the photo stuff goes (and possibly getting that "this is more than it appears to be" vibe), what if the application opens, for the first time, with an ominous set of messages? Like, you get the standard ones for access to location services, and anything else that requires access (photos), and then the user receives one about... consent?

For crashing, I really want to make it so, at the very least, the player has to leave the application (possibly close it in the multitasking menu... thing. Is there a better term for it?). Can I kill the application, forcing the user to do this? I'm not asking for advice here, just, whether or not this is actually allowed by Apple.

[mkpred]

hmm good if i get a message so i know that the app deserves to be deleted IF the name will be different from guberdeck since i am going to stay away from that named app.
sorry no offence but i give importance to privacy more than some other things if you know what i mean.

[Pman]

I would try contacting apple directly, as going through here, I do not thin you will find someone who has ever even attempted to put something like that in their application.

By the way, I think it's great you are thinking outside of the box. It's creative and I love that in apps. Maybe let the user take their own front facing photo through the application, or upload one from their photos? I don't know, just my thoughts.

[Connector]

Can a developer put coding in an app to crash to protect from piracy? Like detecting if a device is pirated, it will crash on launch rather than run?

[chunkyguy]

Originally Posted by RoanHorse

Alright, allow me to explain myself. I want to make a game about 'decking'. You know, hacking into stuff, the incredibly incorrect portrayal of hacking that the movies have been peddling since computers became a thing in the average American's home.
>photos
I want to do something like The Heist, where the player is contacted by an NPC. Specifically, I need a picture of the player for immersion. Taking it without their consent makes it a very surreal experience. The picture would not be uploaded to anywhere.
>crashing
Immersion. The first time you (inevitably) fail, the application would crash. When you open it up again, you'd be contacted by an NPC expressing his/her worry over you 'going offline suddenly'.

Even if it's possible, I don't think as a gamer I would love my own crappy photo in the game. Rather, it would pull me out of the game world.

Like, every other popular game I've seen uses a fictional character that we have to play. If you're making a Heist game, the character should make the users closer to their fantasy character, not themselves.

When someone plays GTA as a thug, doesn't means that they want to be thugs in real life. There is a huge gap between fiction and reality, that is going to collapse with the gamers' real photo of laying on the couch with his cat crawling in the background while listening to the mission briefing.

How would you feel, if you're watching some future James Bond movie and with the technology they swap the face of James Bond with your unsolicited one, while you were sipping cola.

[AlexsIpad]

Originally Posted by RoanHorse

Alright, allow me to explain myself. I want to make a game about 'decking'. You know, hacking into stuff, the incredibly incorrect portrayal of hacking that the movies have been peddling since computers became a thing in the average American's home.
>photos
I want to do something like The Heist, where the player is contacted by an NPC. Specifically, I need a picture of the player for immersion. Taking it without their consent makes it a very surreal experience. The picture would not be uploaded to anywhere.
>crashing
Immersion. The first time you (inevitably) fail, the application would crash. When you open it up again, you'd be contacted by an NPC expressing his/her worry over you 'going offline suddenly'.

To be honest I'm not sure many people would understand the crashing thing, they would just think there was a problem with the app, unless you made it REALLY obvious. Otherwise you may see your app on the app store rated 1 star due to confused people. Oh, and I actually highly doubt that taking a photo without consent is legal. I suppose you could contact apple somehow and ask them about it. However nowadays it could be legal, here in London there are cameras every 2 metres haha, it's like 1984

[DannyTheElite]

You could have it crash to a picture of their home screen for 5 seconds and then re open

[bigrand1]

I'd never advocate doing either of those things at all. No reason why anyone would want that to happen to them. Let me know as well, then it's time to sue, baby, SUE! Put an end to that stupid crap!