Game Progress Update #26

Hello world! and welcome to the twenty sixth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

I can’t believe that it’s been an entire year since the first progress update on this project. And boy, look at how much the game has changed!

The above image is a still taken from the very first progress report. I was demonstrating some of the basic systems which I had implemented, things like the controlling the player and the parallax scrolling background.

And here we have a screen capture from the 25th Update! As you can see the game has come on in leaps and bounds over the last year. There isn’t very much left to do now until it’s ready for the first round of testing.

In fact this update I have been trying as hard as I could to get the remaining tasks finished from the In Progress column on the Trello, and get as many of the bugs fixed and out the way.

Some finishing touches

The first thing I did was add a sound effect for the Second Chance boost, and implemented playing it when the boost is activated. This was pretty simple to do as all the systems and code was already in place.

The sound effect was from one of the sound packs I’d downloaded previously for this project, and is currently being used as is without any post production editing.

Scoring

The next thing on the list was the scoring for the game. In the GDD this was specified to be based on the number of screen widths that the player had moved. Using the base size of the graphics, 144px instead of the actual device width for fairness. It also needed to use timer based movement to ensure that people with faster devices didn’t end up with a hidden advantage.

In the original prototype, I had it set so the score increased by 0.1 each frame, which was not what the GDD said.

I soon changed this so it worked as described in the GDD by adding a distance# variable to the player type, and recording the distance travelled by the player ship. Once this distance variable reached 144.0 then the score was increased and the distance variable reset back to zero, and the score is increased by 1 point.

After I’d played a few games with the new scoring system in place, it was decided that the score was increasing too slowly, so I changed it so it increased by one point every 14.4 pixels travelled.

Bug fixes

I also managed to blast my way through half a dozen or so cards from the Known bugs/issues column of the Trello.

Buying boosts now correctly deducts coins from the coins total, and using a boost will reduce the inventory count by one.

I fixed a couple of problems relating to the scrolling background at game over. Zone assets now scroll by at the proper speed and bullets will continue moving also.

I also fixed bugs relating to the ship engine sound not ending at the end of a game, changing the volume of the music intro section, and the head start boost now plays the shield sound as well as activating the shield.

I did however manage to find a new bug though, so I’ve added that to the Trello also.

Until next time

And that’s all for this update! There won’t be an update for Flappy-vaders next fortnight as I’m travelling to Spain for a week to be the Best man at my friends wedding 🙂 Instead the next update will be on the 24th of September (I have checked, and double checked this date after the last time, lol)

I’m hoping to have finished off the remaining bugs, done perhaps a little more work on the level design and be nearly ready for the first round of testing.

So I’ll see you all again then 🙂

Update #25

Hello World! And welcome to the twenty fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

In this update, I’ve been busy working on level design, and expanding on the zones system.

Zones system

In previous builds of Flappy-vaders, the zones system had been set up with a multi dimensional array to store the zones in, but I had only used the First slot in each to store data, even though a couple of the zone types had two different layouts already.

So, the first thing I did was organise the array contents, allocating the second zone type layouts to [n,1] where they existed, and if there was not then I created an empty zone instead with only the zone marker sprite to indicate the start of the zone.

Next was to implement a system to select the sub zones from the array. I’d planned for this in the early stages of development, and had a variable called subZoneID set to 0 on the line under the one where it selected the primary zone type. I replaced the 0 with Random(0,1) for the time being, although I should have the upper limit as a constant. I’ll address this once I am further along.

Level design

I decided against creating a level editor for this game due to the limited amount of time I have for creating Flappy-vaders each week. This is a decision I am maybe regretting now, lol 🙂

//	Coins
zoneData$[3,0] = "250;130,50,3,0;175,50,3,0;225,50,3,0;275,40,3,0;325,30,3,0;"

The level is stored as a string, which contains the zone length, then groups of three integers to represent the x & y positions and the imageID of the sprite as shown in the code snippet below.

Because of the simplicity of the level data, I am just writing them by hand for the time being. Although I certainly wouldn’t call it fun, and it’s surprisingly time consuming.

Ultimately I would like to create 5 subzones per zone, giving a total of 25 total subzones. This should be adequate for the first round of testing. We can review whether I need to add more after some user feedback.

And that’s all for now

That’s it for this update! I’ll be back in two weeks with the next update.

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for next time. There are couple of bits which need finishing off in the “In progress” column on the Trello.

I must also set some time aside to review the Trello and GDD to see if there is anything which needs updating there as well.

See you next time 🙂