Archive November 27, 2020

Game Progress Update #10

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Update #10

Hello world! And welcome to the tenth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! This week the work has continued with the menus and a few graphical updates.

Menu Graphics Updates

After what felt like an eternity of downloading and trying different 8 bit style pixel fonts I finally found the one I’m using in the picture below (With a little help from @Opkins from the MK:Game Dev discord, who sent me a link to it).

It’s certainly clean and stylish, but I’m a little sad that the zeros don’t have the line through them. This is the single most distinguishing feature for an 8 bit style font in my opinion.

The main Flappy-vaders logo on the title screen has also been updated. The original was too high-resolution and didn’t match the rest of the graphics. The new version fixes this.

I also have spent some time creating icons for the buttons, as shown in the picture above. These represent upgrade purchase, in game currency purchase, view trophies and about/help.

I’m not entirely happy with the icons tbh, but they’ll certainly do until I can get more time to update the graphics.

Upgrades store

The other main area I’ve been working on is the upgrades store section of the menus.

As you can see from the video, the player can now scroll this list by dragging their finger up or down the screen. And also purchase the shield upgrades by tapping on the button.

This is about as far as I managed to get this update due to some problems I’ve been having trying to differentiate between a tap and a drag with the UI system.

Currently if you start a drag by pressing on the buttons, then the purchase is made and the next box lights up to show this. Unfortunately this isn’t desired behaviour, as I do not want a drag to register as a purchase.

Upgrades

I have also spent some time creating a system to maintain the upgrade purchases the player makes. Currently this is just an array to store values in and a couple of functions to load and save the array to disk.

Next time

And thats all for this time round 🙂 In the next update, I hope to have the dragging bug fixed, and the rest of the upgrade purchasing stuff finished.

Once these are done then it’s time to actually implement some of the powerups in the game.

See you next time 🙂

Comment First Coding

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Comment first coding

Comment first coding is a technique that I have used for many many years, but only today found out it has an actual name! (I had a jolly good Google before starting writing this post).

I find it especially useful when I am coding in a language which I am not overly familiar with.

The basic premise of Comment first coding, is planning out what you want your code to do using either plain English, pseudo-code or a mixture of both, in comments.

Then going through one comment at a time, actually writing the code proper.

	//db-jointeam.php - POST(team ID), find playerID from username ($_SESSIONS variable)
	//	If playerID = specified Team's ownerID
	//		Add player to teamlobbyplayers
	//		Set isActive to 1
	//	Else
	//		If isActive = 1
	//			Add player to teamlobbyplayers
	//		Else
	//			Error, lobby not active
	//		Endif
	//	Endif

Above is an example of some Comment first coding from a project I am working on which uses PHP to access a MySQL Database which holds the games player and team data.

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much all there is to Comment first coding. Like I said earlier, I find this technique to be extremely helpful generally, but more so when I’m using a language which I’m not overly familiar with.

Game Progress Update #9

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Update #9

Hello World, and welcome to the ninth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update. I’ve not managed to get as much done as I’d have liked, but once again, the curse of tiny image resolutions has made creating the graphical assets take a fair bit longer than I was expecting.

The Menu

The first and most obvious change to this update is the inclusion of the menu button in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

I’ve used a simple ham burger style icon to represent the menu, shown above with the red exclamation mark indicating that there is something to see in one or more of the menus.

Pressing the menu button opens up the main menu screen. There are currently three buttons, but depending on how things look, I may split the upgrades into two sections, which would require a 4th button.

I didn’t have time to finish the icons for these buttons so they have only simple text labels right now. Each one of the buttons opens up a new UI page.

Pressing the Upgrade button takes you to the upgrade page, where the player can unlock and upgrade various powerups,

All of the UI elements on the menus are created using the existing UI systems which I created earlier in the project.

Power Up Icons

I’ve also created icons for the power ups which the player collects. Below are the icons for the Magnet, Shield, Multiplier and Smart-bomb powerups.

I’ve not however managed to implement them properly into the game yet though.

Refactoring the UI Systems

I spent several hours refactoring the UI systems code after I noticed a much better way of organising the variables. It’s not really changed the way the code works, and there are no visible changes to the player.

Next time

In the next update I hope to have the UI looking a lot more complete, and be fairly functional as well. I’d also like to get the power-up collection a little closer to completion as well.

I also have a lot of updating to do on the Trello board and the GDD, I will try and get these done soon and I’ll update you via social media.

See you next time 🙂