Game Progress Update #41

Hello world, Welcome to the forty first Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

Summer time is well and truly upon us this week. My phone is saying it’s currently 30° outside, and the car agrees. It is definitely a very hot day today.

I’m currently sitting at my desk in front of the fan as I write this and I’m still an unpleasant sweaty mess.

I got a good few hours of work done on the game this time around. Mostly more Daily Missions stuff.

Daily Missions

All the work I’d done on the Daily Missions in the last Game Progress Update had introduced a couple of new bugs. I worked on these things first

Daily Mission Selection

I’d made a rather simple error with this. There are 5 mission types currently, which range from 0 to 4. When I’d coded the bit which selected new missions at random, I’d simply set the maxMissionTypeCount constant to 5, the number of actual mission types currently. However when I used this in the Random() function it ended up returning values ranging from 0 to 5! This is the cause of the occasional blank daily mission.

I fixed it by simply changing the value to 4 and making a note in a comment above the constant.

Daily Mission Reset

Another problem with the code turned out to be with the way the new reset time was calculated. I found that if you ran the game after the reset time that day, every time you clicked the game icon you would get a new set of daily missions.

This was one of those problems which I had to sit down and think about with a pen and paper. I worked out that the problem was that the game was choosing the new reset time to be 8pm on the same day. Meaning that when you started the game after 8pm, the game would decide the timer was over and refresh the mission list.

To fix this issue, after the existing code. I added a check to see if the hours component of the time was 20 or greater, and if it was then to add 24 hours to the reset timer. I’ve tested this and it appears to work.

Targets and Rewards

The other thing I’ve gotten done with the Daily Missions is decide on a way to determine the target values and reward amount for the missions.

I decided to expand on the missionTotals[] array data, by changing it from an integer array to a typed array and adding variables to store the minimumTarget and the maximumTarget, as well as the step value. As well as the minimumReward and maximumReward also.

The system record the number of times a mission type is successfully completed. This value is used with the step value to determine how far between the minimum and maximum values the target value and the reward is.

These values don’t change and will be stored in the array but not saved to the missions save file.

The Alpha test

I also have officially launched the alpha test. This is an exact snapshot of the current build of Flappy-vaders so some of it doesn’t work and some of it doesn’t work very well.

Those who have provided me with an email address will be receiving an email with instructions on how to download and play the game.

Don’t worry if you haven’t, there is still time! Just let me know either by email or social media, what google mail address is associated with your android and I’ll add you to the list of testers.

I’m actually excited to get some new perspectives on the game.

That’s all folks

And that is all I have to share this time round. I’ll as always be back in two weeks with another update for you.

Game Progress Update #40

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

It’s been a fairly strange time the last couple of weeks. Two of my children celebrated their birthdays, and the whole country is celebrating the Queen’s platinum jubilee with two extra bank holidays yesterday and today.

Despite this I feel like I have had hours to work on the game, which I have thrown myself into. So much so that I completely forgot to post any social media on Dev with Dave the last week. (Oops – will do better next week I promise)

Anyway, I’ve mostly been working on the daily missions this update, and have made loads of progress which I will tell you about shortly.

but first, a slight change in the hardware I’m using.

A slight change

Although the tablet still works, I’ve been hesitant to use it with the cracked screen. I’ll try and get it fixed as soon as I can. In the mean time I’m using my laptop instead.

It’s a few years old, and isn’t the most powerful. I’ll find a list of the actual spec of it for the next update.

Daily Missions

The first thing I did was to create the array to store the number of times the player has completed each mission type. I will use this value to determine the difficulty of the next mission by increasing the target value in relation to the number of times the player has previously completed a mission of that type.

This array was also added to the daily mission save data, as well as new values to record the players progress with each mission, as well as whether or not the challenge had been completed.

Next I tweaked the layout of the Daily Missions panels in the UI. This involved repurposing the second line of text to contain the reward, realigning it to the right, and adding the coin icon.

While I was making changes to the UI I also added a countdown to the divider at the top of the daily missions page. Fortunately AGK has commands to return the hours, minutes and seconds from UNIX time so it was quite simple to implement.

The next thing I did was create a function which could update the text on the daily mission page of the UI. Ultimately this function will also change the daily mission icon as well, but for now it’s just the text and a grey square.

New Bugs Introduced

As with any bit of prolonged coding, I have of course introduced a couple of new bugs.

Firstly, the bit where it counts down the daily mission timer works perfectly, however it does not reset the time properly. This results in the missions resetting every time you play the game instead of daily.

Secondly I think I have miss understood how the Random command works in AGK as instead of returning a 0 to 4 when choosing a new random mission type, it’s returning a 0 to 5. Which means occasionally that there is a blank mission on the daily mission page.

Both these bugs have been added to the Trello and the bugs page here on the website.

That’s all for now

And that is about all I have managed for this update.

I’ll be back as always in two weeks (give or take the odd day) when I hope to have the Daily missions working properly. I also hope to get the test build updated.

Anyway, until next time

Dave 🙂