Game Progress Update #43

Hello world! And welcome to the forty third Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

This updates disaster (as it seems I have a new one every time I write this blog) involved Kirk, my PC which took much longer to upgrade than I thought it would. This did eat quite drastically into the time I had free for writing Flappy-vaders.

Regardless of this I have got a fair chunk of coding done for the game. Carrying on from update 42, I have been mostly working on the daily missions.

Keep reading to find out more 🙂

PC Upgrades

I decided to spend my weekend off the other week upgrading my main PC. I had purchased a new SSD, 8Gb of extra ram from Crucial, and a fancy back lit gaming keyboard.

Fitting the parts wasn’t too challenging. The Ram and keyboard were a breeze to fit, but the SSD data and Power wires were a bit of a squeeze as my case around 15 years old and wasn’t designed with such a huge graphics card as the one I have, in mind.

The problems started when I tried to clone my existing copy of windows onto the new drive. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get the PC to boot from the cloned copy of Windows.

Now bearing in mind this is the computer I use for work most days, so I can’t really afford to have it out of action for long. But It didn’t take long before I had used all the time allocated for the job with no success at all. 😞

In the end however (after wasting another couple of days) I decided to just give the PC a fresh install of Windows, even if it did mean having to waste even more time reinstalling all the apps as well.

Daily Missions

The first thing I did when I managed to get AGK Studio open on the laptop, was add code to add a little bit of polish to the daily missions pages in the UI.

This involved greying out missions when they were completed, and hiding the coin icon when the mission is set to done.

When I tested the new additions, I noticed that the daily missions done and progress values weren’t being reset when the missions refreshed.

This was fixed by adding a couple of lines of code to reset the two variables in the RefreshDailyMissions() function.

The last thing I did towards the daily missions was adding functionality to some more of the daily mission types.

The “Play n games” mission was done by adding a line of code to increase the progress . Everything else was handled by code written previously.

I also added functionality to the “Collect n coins” mission. Again all this needed was a simple line of code. This time in the function which checked player collisions, when colliding with a coin.

Uploaded new test build!

The last thing I have to say is that I have uploaded the third test build of Flappy-vaders to Google Play for testing.

I’m preparing to send out the initial email to the testers with the link so they can enroll in the test and download the latest version of the game. So if you have told me you want to be a tester then keep an eye on your inboxes.

And thats all for now

I’ll be back as always in two weeks with another update. Hopefully it will involve lots of improvements to the game, and slightly fewer general life disasters for me, lol.

Thank you as always for following the project.

Until next time

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #42

Hello world! And welcome to the forty second Dev with Dave game progress update!

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the update who’s number is the same as the answer to life, the universe and everything, falls (almost) on the same day as my birthday!

In this update, I’ve mostly been working on the Daily Missions, which has not only been a much bigger task than I anticiptated, but has also been a huge pile of fun to write.

The laptop

As I said last update, I’m using my laptop for the foreseeable future after I accidentally dropped the tablet and smashed the corner of the screen. I will take it to the shop to find out how much the repair will be soon, but until then I’m using the laptop.

It’s not the greatest piece of kit in the world, but is a significant step up from the Atom powered tablet which I had been using. I couldn’t remember the exact model and spec last time, so here they are for anyone who is interested.

It’s an HP 15-bs158sa, with an Intel i5-8250U cpu, a 1Tb HDD and 8Gb of ram.

No duplicate missions!

The first thing I did was fix a bug which occasionally caused duplicate daily missions. This was a simple enough fix. I simply added a check to see if any of the Mission Types were the same, and if they were then to regenerate the list of missions.

It’s possibly not the most elegant solution, but it works 🙂

Daily Mission Functionality

The daily missions are a lot closer to being finished than they were before. I still have quite a way to go, but I’m definitely making progress.

When the game generates a new list of daily missions, it now also provides them with preliminary values for the target and the reward. Ultimately these will be generated using a formula based on the number of times the player has completed the mission type before, but until then, it is just using single fixed values.

I have also added a function which updates the daily missions progress value, and created a function which checks to see if the daily missions progress is greater or equal to the missions target value.

Completing Missions

Originally I simply had the game freeze with a message on screen, when it had detected a daily mission had been completed. This was fine for development, but wouldn’t be well received by actual players no doubt. lol.

The first thing was to decide what information needed to be put on the revised game over screen.

I decided that the player needed to know their score and coin count, so they were copied and pasted from the game ui screen.

Next was the daily missions themselves, which was decided to be a text description and a reward value (with a coin icon)

Lastly was resizing and repositioning the existing Game Over and Tap to continue texts.

After several hours of planning and sketching, then editing code etc. The final result looks like this.

I added the code to update the daily missions listed on the game over screen to the function I had already created which set the text on the missions page of the ui.

A whole load of new rough edges

A lot of the daily missions stuff I’ve written about above only works for two of the five daily mission types at best.

The last time I played it I noticed that the missions weren’t always being completed when the progress reached or passed the target value.

Sadly I have run out of time for this update, but I will be back at it soon and hope to have Daily Missions done and dusted for the next update.

That’s all for now

That’s all the time I have for now. I’m actually super impressed that for the first time in absolutely months I have got this update finished and shared on time! lol

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the blog. I’ll be back in a fortnight with more news about the game, including how well the first round of testing is going.

If you want to be involved in the testing, it’s not too late, just drop me a message or email.

Until next time

Dave 🙂