Game Progress Update #37

Game Progress Update #37

Hello world, and welcome to the 37th Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

As I said on social media earlier this week, I’ve been quite ill recently with a nasty cold (Not Covid 19 however, so I’m thankful for that)

So sadly I’ve been wrapped up under a blanket on the sofa instead of working through the Flappy-vaders to do list.

I have managed to get some work done on the game as well as hopefully fixing the website, so it’s not all doom and gloom, but I’m afraid that this probably isn’t going to be the longest or most in depth update in the world.

Website Security (Again!)

One of the biggest time consumers recently in this project has been managing the enormous number of user accounts which have been created on the website.

I have recently changed the way new accounts are created using the “Email verification for WooCommerce” plugin by WPFactory, which I have used on other websites to prevent similar spam attacks.

I hope this will be the last time that I need to mention this in the blog! lol

Unread Notifications

All that was really left to do with the notifications was to get the loading/saving to work, so that any unread notifications were transferred from one game to the next.

Everything was going swimmingly well, and I was quite happy with the code until it was time to compile and run it…

Unfortunately it took whatever little time I had remaining to work out where I’d made the mistake (it turned out I was using the wrong constant in a for-next loop, for those who were wondering)

However, the rest of the code worked more or less as intended. There is always a few small tweaks to make along the way, lol.

The program makes use of two new functions I wrote, one to LoadNotifyData() and one to SaveNotifyData(). The data isn’t important to game play in any way, so for the time being I am simply storing it as a plain text file.

Loading the Notify data is done when the game is run while the rest of the user data is also loaded.

The game calls the SaveNotifyData() function when the player presses the back button from the main menu. This seemed to be the most logical place to call it from.

Uploading to Google Play

Following on from the >Last Update< where I failed to upload the compiled .aab file to Google Play because they took umbrage at me using the same keystore file that I used for .apk files previously.

So the first thing I did was to create a new Keystore file using AGK Studio. This was done easily from the Tools drop down menu.

Next was to create the .aab file itself. Fortunately AGK Studio had retained all of the data I’d previously entered, which was a pleasant surprise. Things like Ad Mob ID, The Firebase details etc.

Once the aab file was compiled, it was time to upload it (And cross my fingers… lol)

This time the .aab was accepted without problem, and all I need to do now is press the “Roll out to internal testing” button! If you want to be a tester, then it’s not too late, drop me a message or email or whatever and let me know!

That’s all folks!

And that brings us nicely to the end of this update. I will be back in two weeks with another one!

In the mean time, don’t forget to follow Dev with Dave on social media.

See you soon.

Game Progress Update #36

Game Progress Update #36

Hello World! Welcome once again to another Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

In this update, I’ve spent some time thinking about how best to do the daily bonus screen, I’ve created and tried to upload another build of the game, and as always these days I’ve been battling suspicious activity on the website.

Daily Bonus Screen

When I originally planned the Daily bonus, I was thinking of a spinning prize wheel, but I don’t think this idea translates too well into a low res pixel art style.

Instead I decided to try and implement a scratch card style bonus, where you are presented with a six panel scratch card and you win a prize if you match 3 symbols.

I’ve seen the scratch card approach in a few games, but the most memorable one is from Dice with Buddies by Scopely.

The video at the top of the page shows an attempt at creating a scratch card effect. This is based on code from the TGC forums posted by Kevin Cross.

Uploading to Google Play

After the promising start I got off to in the last Game Update, I’m afraid I’m still no further along to getting Flappy-vaders uploaded and ready for testing.

As you can see from the screen grab, when I went to upload the .aab, it threw up an error because I had used a key store which I had used to publish other .apks.

This is the first time I’ve tried publishing using an Android App Bundle (aab) rather than the old style Android Package Kit (apk) files.

Still, It’s a fairly easy task to create a new keystore file specifically for this.

Website Security

I’m still finding I’m getting a few hundred sign ups to the Dev with Dave website which are suspicious at best. I was hoping that the reintroduction of the reCaptcha on the signup form would have been enough to stop it, but sadly that has not worked.

I did try a different approach, with a new security plugin, but again it seems to have not made a dent in the spammers signing up.

I’m going to try and add email verification next. Where you have to authenticate the account by clicking a ink in an email which the website sends to new signups. This has proven effective on other websites I’ve been involved with recently.

And that’s all for now

I’ll no doubt be back in two weeks with another Game progress update. I expect I’ll have the test build uploaded to the play store, so please, if you haven’t already joined the test program, drop me an email or message and I’ll let you know how to join up.

Dave