Underworld officially rejected
This has finally happened — we have got a response from Apple, referring to the well known Section
Well, we have to change the way it is and yet not to spoil all the fun, right? And that is why we would like to hear from you now 
After the game was launched in Cydia, we have got tons of insightful feedback, this is really working! Now we want your ideas on the reskin. Please let us know, which commodities would you like to see in the AppStore version of the game!
You can drop a note either here in comments, or in twitter if you like. The same survey was opened in the game, check the About screen to participate.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Tell apple to put a rating system in affect like all the other games!! Let us play whatever games we want. I don’t have a jail broken phone, I check this site 3 times a week waiting for news of a release!! I’d pay for this game right now.
I don’t know what wrong with it so I can’t make any suggestions. I can only say keep up the good work and don’t let this keep ya down even though it’s a kick in the balls.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
It is possible to beat this system. It took us 6 months to get iStrip into the App Store by playing cat and mouse games with Apple. Read about it http://tr.im/f3sr, also on Krapps.
February 16th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Make that iPhones, iPods, Macs and Mac Software and other gadgets and you’ll be in the AppStore in no time
February 16th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Hi guys. I’m sorry so hear about Underworld being reject by mac. Keep the spirit alive and keep on the good work lads. X
February 16th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I don’t get it, all you need to do is change the names of stuff right?
make it sci-fi, like candy wars, where all candy was banned,
make it fantasy where we’re all dwarfs selling rare flowers and mushrooms to witches who wanna make sleeping apples,
make it realistic where we’re scavengers buying medicine that was intercepted by soldiers from peace organizations and sell them to doctors without borders and refugee camps.
lol anything that doesn’t mention speed, coke, trafficker and they will eventually approve it
February 16th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
How about some sort of skinning? The game goes through as cornflake wars but you can reskin to make what ever you like… Is. Drugs? It doesn’t bother me that much anyway, I play the game because it’s different not because of the drug theme. Could be selling sand I’d still play.
February 16th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
i say release it skinned with whatever
and release a theme in cydia that will replace all the images to the ones we’re using =)
February 16th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
ive got an idea that might work, make it some candy store game type of thing trading in sweets but let us cydia peeps keep the real game but have them linked so someone on appstore will be buying sherbet and someone on cydia will be buying coke.
February 16th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
sak3r and modo, You got it there.
I completely agree with you both. Make the version on have themes.
and Jigsaw:
You said it. I play it because its different.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Erm how about special rocks? Like Rubys, diamonds ect
February 16th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
*etc
February 17th, 2009 at 1:05 am
I think you can take a note from a fairly popular, albeit kiddy, game. Viva Pinata.
They combined two groups of things, to create a new thing. They used animals and candies. Here are some examples:
Animal: Crocodile
Candy: Cocoa
Name: Cocoadile
—————————–
Animal: Rhinoceros
Candy: Lime
Name: Limeoceros
—————————–
Animal: Racoon
Candy: Macaroon
Name: Macaraccoon
Ok so you can see it’s kinda clever. The real fun of it all is thinking of names for the materials we buy/sell to others. I’m going to use drugs and candies, but any other group of thing would work as well, it depends on what object we are selling, aside from drugs.
Drug: Marijuana
Candy: Marshmallow
Name: Marimallow
—————————–
Drug: Speed (Amphetamine)
Candy: S’more
Name: S’moretamine
OR
Candy: Mint
Name: Amphetamint
—————————–
Drug: Coke
Candy: Cocoa
Name: Cocoain
(I realize that one is really stretching it… like REALLY)
—————————–
Drug: Shrooms (Fungi)
Candy: Bubble Gum
Name: Fungum
These are just MY ideas, you get a bunch of people working on this, you would have quite a lot of silly, cute, and hopefully legitimate creative names that will allow you to get into the AppStore. Your limited by creativity here, as each drug has a plethora of ’street’ names, it has it’s chemical compound scientific name, and a more natural usable name as well that wouldn’t be considered ’street’.
If you take anything from my post of ideas, the one thing I hope you take away is that, if possible, the jailbroken version and the AppStore version should work together, just have different’skins’ as you so succinctly put it in your post.
I do think working with drugs adds a visceral feel to the game, and using something else might not target the right audience, but even if you had to use purely candies… I’m sure you could still make it attractable.
I’m loving this game, it’s my favorite on the iPhone, it loads fast, it doesn’t require much attention at all, and it’s fun.
I hope my input was marginally helpful, keep up the great work on this app, and I’m sorry to hear you guys got rejected.
February 17th, 2009 at 1:16 am
on a side note,
today i couldn’t find almost anything to buy and took like 4 hours to sell stuff.
compared to my other 4 days where i was buying and selling every 10 minutes it wasn’t fun.
lol
also I’m on a 2G iPhone and there’s a bug with my location when im at home (it’s not underworld it affects the maps also) it says I’m in Budapest, Hungary when in fact I’m in Setubal, Portugal
this is fine as there are enough people/bots to play and I really don’t care where it says I am.
but when i leave home I’m back in portugal and while bots/people show up in the map they never have anything to sell.. in fact i think i’ve done all my buying/selling at home.
I’ve upgraded my trade area to level 3, carry space to lvl1 and yesterday i upgraded tradable items, but now I don’t want to upgrade more items because all the bots are selling is niagra and weed, sometimes they sell 1 or 2 peyote but always for about 179 and I’m yet to see some speed for sale.
is this normal or something you can fix?
February 17th, 2009 at 1:25 am
sak3r, I’m running into a similar situation, I re-installed it and within minutes all my stuff sold… it was weird.
Not sure what happens, if there is some corruption of files/data, or if it’s just random…
Lemme know if that helps (your stuff doesn’t get erased if you do it from cydia)
February 17th, 2009 at 2:00 am
im going to do that
but i can’t imagine this being a local problem
thanks for the fast reply either way
February 17th, 2009 at 9:21 am
my iphone 3g crashed and now my underworld icon is gone. i restored my iphone and installed underworld but the icon isnt still there, now i have reinstalled it 5 times but nothing happend. pls help i want to go on this is my favourite app no1. =(
February 17th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Thanks to everyone, these are great ideas, together with all the stuff we are getting through the game survey I think we’ll definitely choose something very cool soon
Keep it up 
February 17th, 2009 at 10:34 am
jointe24, this stuff happens very rarely when you have some updates not installed in Cydia.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I can’t stop thinking of ideas. Ignore me if they are rubbish! Is it possible to make certain resources location fixed, so you would have to go and mine or harvest from certain places?also if missions were added, would buyable items be used within the mission, this may encourage more trading. Lastly creating groups or gangs, this way you expand on the location side as well as helping create stronger dealing circles.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I totally love the idea of it changing to something like “Gem Merchant” or something… Give it a old timey Middle Eastern graphic theme, change the currency type, have assassins or roving bands of thieves killing your traders and taking the money they were supposed to use to buy the gems.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
don’t forget than in less populated areas location doesn’t work so good, like i said before when im home im in Hungary and when i cross the street im back in Portugal, that could be a problem if i get assigned missions in places i can’t go
February 17th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I think that since the game uses the maps of the actual world, you should try to keep it modern… My friends and I were discussing this…
The best thing we could come up with was that it should be stolen goods, all the people playing are fences, and the boys could be pro thieves. It could start small, like selling cell phones and watches, and then get bigger, like diamonds, cars, paintings and maybe even various types of guns… Like weapon trafficing.
This way the other upgrades wouldn’t have to change, and the game would still have that rogue-ish vibe that probably attacted some players. Even the name “underworld” still works.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Drrr… Just read my last post. Boys = bots.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:05 am
and how would replace drug dealers with thieves convince apple this game isn’t offensive?
although you’re right didn’t think about the maps
it raises some rules to this “skin”
how about if we’re in some sort of harry potter world, where wizards live in this world and time but see stuff we don’t
we could be selling stuff to wizards and buying it from gnomes
or we could be selling latex and black leather suits to vampires. lol
February 18th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Honestly, it may work. people find drugs offencive not because of the illegality, but because of the emotional damage they cause to people, much like a big disease, like cancer. But in this day and age, thieves have become romanticed versions of the real thing (I.e. The “oceans” movies, that show “leverage”, even robin hood)
Yeah, it’s still illegal, but not nearly as immoral. so I’m sticking by my comment.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:10 am
thanks andrey, can you tell me pls what updates i have to install i would do everythink to go on with this nice game.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:35 am
so in your opinion this could be renamed to pawnshop, what’s the motive to buy from other players?
February 18th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Pearls
Ruby
Diamond
Sapphire
Emerald
Precious Opal
Topaz
Zircon
Alexandrite
February 18th, 2009 at 11:10 am
jointe24, when you open Cydia, do you see an alert saying that you have some critical updates to make? Or maybe you see a red numbered pin up on the Changes section button? If you have any of those things, let Cydia make all the necessary updates (hit Update all) and see what happens next.
Yet I’m not sure this is going to solve the problem, but it happened to me a couple of times before. Let me know how it works for you either way.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
my cydia is up to date, at changes i refreshed a cupple of times and nothing red. in cydia i can see and install underworl but it isnt on the homescreen, i looked in SBsettings at “hide icons” but it isnt there too =( i dont now what to do i tried everything
February 18th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
can you show me the path where i can find it on my iphone if i ssh. like:root/private/var/….
then i could serch it and look if it really installed
sry for my bad english i am from germany
February 18th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
jointe24, open /private/var/stash, and locate folder named Applications.SOMETHING (random amount of characters instead of SOMETHING). There can be even two folders like that. One of them should contain Underworld.app
February 18th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I love the game, I play it all the time, but to be honest, instead of worrying about adding new features, I think the focus should be making the game more stable. I frequently crash (probably twice a day). Just scrolling to another drug screen is often times glitchy and painful. When buying drugs sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t… you can try to buy the same drugs 6-7 times before it actually works… I’m not sure if this is an issue with the game refreshing after you make your purchase or what, but it’s a headache.
The bugs are frustrating. I feel a more solid foundation is important before trying to re-skin this, add new features, and get it on the app store. I feel that the reviews will be less than stellar for the game in it’s current state, and I really want this game to succeed. I would love to have more human players and less bots… I really liked the suggestions of letting jailbreak people keep this version, and still be able to trade with the app store folks.
The upgrade method should be tweaked as well. I keep getting busted, so my police protection is at 3 and everything else is at 2. I need 50k for the next update, and I’m sure 100k for the update after that. I can upgrade the number of items I can carry, but that doesn’t make sense since there aren’t enough bots selling the high dollar items, so I’ll just have a shit load of viagra. the same problem is with upgrading to the next drug.. I have a hard enough time finding people with ecstasy… I’m sure the next drug up will give me similar problems… upgrades should be per category, instead of across the board.
I’m sure I’m being picky, and there are a ton of people that like the game, I just hope this is looked at as constructive criticism and not bashing the game, because I love it, and hope to see you succeed. I wish I could give you ideas programatically, but I’ve never messed with objective c, and that’s the main reason I’ve steered clear of the app store.. I’m more of a php developer.
Good luck.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Sak3r, the motivation would be to make money, just like buying and selling gems, or drugs. But I was thinking more of a black market motif, instead of A pawn shop.
For everyone else, I was thinking it would be really cool if after the g-rated version is released to the appstore, if you also released a patch on cydia that would reskin the game back to the orginial drugdealing version, for the people who love the game as it is, and doesn’t want to see it change.
February 19th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
back again!!!
the problem was me, because i installed a-steroids studio and not underworld. sorry for my unnessesary posts but “shit happens”. and thank you andrey for your good and fast support. =)
i think this what case wrote would be relly cool:
Case
February 17th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I think that since the game uses the maps of the actual world, you should try to keep it modern… My friends and I were discussing this…
The best thing we could come up with was that it should be stolen goods, all the people playing are fences, and the boys could be pro thieves. It could start small, like selling cell phones and watches, and then get bigger, like diamonds, cars, paintings and maybe even various types of guns… Like weapon trafficing.
This way the other upgrades wouldn’t have to change, and the game would still have that rogue-ish vibe that probably attacted some players. Even the name “underworld” still works.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Thanks for the shout out, jointe!
I think the cydia reskin idea would be really awesome, but why not try and make appstore version exciting too? I know the main goal is to tone down the game so the appstore picks it up, but that’s no reason to make almost geared towards children. I mean, the have a beer pong game there, for ch!$@$ sake.
February 20th, 2009 at 12:03 am
i think a kind of harry potter world with would make the game accessible to a lot more people and providing it was kept clever it wouldn’t be childish.
but if we get thieves even better =)
February 20th, 2009 at 12:03 am
well beer is okay, cause it’s legal.. as dumb as it sounds, that’s apple’s reasoning
in that case, why not make that the goal of the game…
start with
moonshine
colt 45 (cheap beer)
box wine
champaign
micro brews (expensive beer)
whiskey
rum
gin
vodka
scotch
set it in the past during the actual prohibition, and you are trying to sell bootleg booze… I mean, booze is legal now, and they have actual apps that promote drinking, so why not promote selling booze?
February 20th, 2009 at 1:18 am
I could TOTALLY get behind that idea chad. I honestly think that’s the best one I heard so far.
February 20th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Chad & Chase, I agree with you both.
Very good idea.
February 21st, 2009 at 1:03 am
I agree that the upgrading should be revamped, but I think these prices might be a little steep, albe. I remember when first started playing how hard it was to earn 5,000… Your later upgrade prices look totally good, but I think the earlier ones should be priced way down, maybe at like 250 - 500 range, just so people won’t blow their whole beginning loan on it. Levels 3, 4, and 5 look good across the board, I’m just saying don’t make it TOO hard for people.
February 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am
Chad, thanks a lot for the feedback. I personally appreciate exactly that kind of it - constructive criticism, as it definitely helping us improve the game
Scrolling troubles and other market screen glitches are going to be fixed in the upcoming version, that’s for sure. Commodity availability should be fixed by our new location organization system (without bots but with a lots of real people). Can’t promise any quick change in the updating mechanism yet - we are going to put more thought on that after the next big push.
Thanks again, I hope you’ll continue playing and providing us with such a feedback
February 21st, 2009 at 10:07 am
Case, what comes to the reskin idea… Well, this is something we have to think about
February 21st, 2009 at 10:08 am
Thanks again for all the commodity ideas
February 23rd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Good luck on the upgrades. I’m currently a Distributer (Next upgrade will be just short of a million) so I’ve made out great in the game but it will be interesting to see how the bot changes are going to effect me. I really wish I could see how I’m doing in comparison to most folks like we could in the past. I’ve probably handed over 200 - 300 Grand to the Cops and I’ve definitely made about 2 to 3 Million in sales. The prospect of that next upgrade isn’t so attractive to me so I play a little less now. The upgrades are cool but a million is a major hit for an upgrade when coke just doesn’t move as fast as the rest of the product. Great game none the less. As an individual that travels between 3 different locations daily while playing, I can definitely see the varying AI in the bots. I’m sure you guys have some great things in store and I wish you nothing but the best.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Thanks, Christian !
March 4th, 2009 at 3:35 am
PlZ i want to know what is that any one can explain that game
March 4th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Zombie, Underworld is a location based game about black market trading.
Basically, game goes like this:
- you try to find cheap stuff (moving around real places increases your chances for a good price)
- give it a higher price (gonna be your profit)
- wait until the stuff is sold (if it doesn’t, maybe your price is too high)
- try another commodity (different commodities are in different demand in different places)
- buy equipment upgrades to become more powerful dealer
- don’t forget about cops and a loan shark
March 7th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Word@Chad (Post February 18th, 2009 at 8:52 pm)
I love the game, but at the moment it is just too buggy, which often is more than annoying, as well as the whole upgrading process. Can’t wait for the update
What I just can’t understand ist, why this app is obscene, while there are dozens (!) of stupid fart apps in the Appstore. Just crap of some kids looking for some easy cash, they don’t even bother doing some nice design.
UW is very buggy (I haven’t been programming for almost 20 years, so I surely don’t qualify for this critic, but the game, at least the frontend is no sooo complex, since the actual gaming doesn’t happen locally on the iPhone…), but it is very clear, that you guys invest very much time in improving. And the graphics are very nicely done, in a free product, not like the crappy fart apps you even have to pay for.
Sorry for my writing, I’m… uhm stoned on something which is not available in UW
March 11th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
i just came to be a distributor , u know how many hour i spend on this game , please help us , any update appears on cydia , come on …please help us
March 11th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
The update went life.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
The quality of the info is what keeps me on this site, thanks!
April 9th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Candy is goin to be stupid. Come on u have to do drugs it is so much better
April 10th, 2009 at 2:28 am
Yeah it’s fun when it’s drugs who wants to sell candy cus if we did the app store has that gay shot already WTF people way to ruin a good thing