Game Progress Update #35

Hello world and welcome to the thirty fifth Dev with Dave game progress update!

In this update, I have managed to get a tiny bit more done to the unread notifications.

I’ve also made some more headway into getting the compiled Flappy-vaders build ready to be uploaded to the Google Play Developer console.

Unread notifications

In the Last Game Progress Update I had more or less got the unread notification system working, all that was left was to create a list of which events would cause a notification to appear on the menu.

After some thought I came up with the following list

• When a boost is unlocked
• When there is a new daily challenge
• When there is a new daily prize
• When a new trophy is awarded

However, since I haven’t written any code for awarding trophies, and I’ve not even created UI pages for the daily challenges or prizes, the only one I can actually write is when a boost is unlocked.

I would still like to add a load/save function for the showNotify properties, so that the data can persist from one session to another.

I will try and create the two pages above ready for the next update, so I can at lease set the notifications even if the missions and prizes don’t work as yet.

Compiling the Game

Compiling the game ready for upload to the Google Play store is surprisingly easy with AGK Studio. There is an option to Export to Android from the menu, which then presents you with the following dialogue box.

The first thing I did was find a suitable image to use as an icon for the compiled game. I just used a screen capture of the Flappy-vaders ship against the gradient sky.

Next I went to the Firebase Console and created an entry for it. I use Firebase to monitor analytics data from the game. Doing this gave me a config file to include in the build to set up the analytics.

And lastly I headed over to Google AdMob to create an Interstitial advert to show between games, and a rewarded advert which the player can watch to earn free coins. Setting these up gave me the AdMob App ID which is also needed in the compilation process.

Once all the data had been filled in it was time to press the Export button.

The actual compilation process only took a few seconds (I used the main PC for the build, but I’ll do the next one on the tablet to compare the time taken), and I now have a compiled .aab (Android App Bundle) file sat waiting to be uploaded.

I have once again however ran out of time for this week! So I won’t upload it till next week.

Once again, If you want to be involved in the first round of testing then please get in touch either by email or social media. There is still time to get added to the list of testers.

Website Security Issues

I was completely wrong about having sorted out the website. I am still getting a steady stream of suspicious signups despite the registration form being protected by a reCaptcha. 🤔

I have a few other ideas to protect the website, but my concern is that securing the website will take time away from actually writing the game. I feel short of time enough for this project as it is.

That’s all folks

And that’s all the news I have for this update. I’m off out tonight to the MK Game Developers Meet-up, but I will be back with another Game Progress Update in two weeks.

Until then.

Dave

Game Progress Update #34

Hello world! Welcome to the thirty fourth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

As I said earlier in the week, unfortunately my girlfriend had to spend a week in hospital thanks to her diabetes so I have had very little time to work on the game and the website. She’s much better now and I’d like to thank everyone who wished her well on social media. You are all awesome <3

This time round I have just about got the unread notifications working on the menus, so the player can be informed when there are new menus to see. (e.g. a new boost being unlocked, or new daily missions to look at)

I’ve also managed to get the website back up and running, and have reinstated things like the forum and user creation etc.

Unread notifications

So carrying on from the last update, I finally managed to get the notifications to draw over every button, but when I went to the store pages I noticed that the notifications didn’t slide up and down with the rest of the icons when the player scrolled the screen.

So I added a line to the code to ensure the notifications moved with the rest of the UI elements on the page, compiled and ran the code again only to discover that the notifications were also being given to the store divider images. This shouldn’t have been the case as I was already testing to see if the elementType property was set to uiButton before drawing the notification sprite.

This turned out to be because the dividers were actually buttons *sigh*. I changed these to uiImages instead, which they were supposed to be in the first place. Compiled the code and ran the game once more.

This time the notifications were appearing only on the correct elements and were scrolling with the buttons on pages where the player can scroll. The problem this time was that the sprite depths were wrong and although they appeared above the buttons like they were supposed to, they also appeared over the top of the title bar at the top of the screen.

Having resolved all these issues it was time to make sure that the notifications were checking to see if the showNotify property of the button was set to true before placing and showing the sprite onscreen. This was achieved with a simple If check, and worked perfectly, resulting in no notifications being shown.

Just to prove that it’s working properly, I then went and manually set 3 of the buttons to show notifications, simulating the path of notifications that would guide a player to a recently obtainable powerup or whatever.

The very last change I made was to unset the showNotify property on buttons which have been pressed.

I still need to find all the events in game which will cause a button to display a notification and add the code to do so at each one, but that will have to wait as I’ve run out of time for now.

Website

After all the palaver with the website over the last month or two, I think I can safely say I have got it all back up and running now.

I’ve sadly had to delete all the accounts associated with the forum, so if you had one before then you’ll have to re-register. Sorry about this. But the forum itself is back up and working as before. Hopefully the reCaptcha will keep the spammers at bay this time

I’ve sadly had to delete all the accounts associated with the forum, so if you had one before then you’ll have to re-register. Sorry about this. But the forum itself is back up and working as before. Hopefully the reCaptcha will keep the spammers at bay this time 🤞

The eagle eyed amongst you may have already spotted the new “Bugs” menu. This takes you to the Bug library page which is just about working now, but still needs some extra polish. It will be ready though in time for the first round of game testing.

That’s all for now

And that’s all I have time for. I’ll be back again in two weeks with another fun packed and exciting (lol) Dev with Dave game progress update. Unless of course the universe conspires against me again and we’re invaded by Godzilla or something like that.