Game Progress Update #46

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

You might have guessed from the lateness of this blog, and general quietness on social media that I’ve not had a great deal of time again this fortnight to work on the game.

This has not been helped by my laptop deciding it was going to install the latest Windows 11 patch today (Which it has done 20% of over the last THREE HOURS!!)

I have managed however to get some work done, so let me tell you about it now

Graphics

The first thing I did this week was to set about optimizing the graphics.

A couple of people who have been testing the game had commented about the graphical asset used in the explosion not matching the resolution of the rest of the game (which was true), so I changed this out for one which followed the design scheme better.

I still think there is room for improvement here. The new sprite feels a little large, and I’m not sure the particle emission settings are quite right.

The only other graphical asset which was left over from the original prototype was the Zone start marker. I have removed this from the couple of zones which still had it.

Play Testing

During my many (many) hours AFK this week, I have at least managed to rack up a few hours of play testing Flappy-vaders on my phone.

I’m happy to announce that I have yet to find any new bugs! I’ll try and get some new ones added to the next build! 🤪 lol

About Page

I can’t remember if I’ve said or not before, but I have an amazing idea for the about page. It’s really retro and works quite well with the graphical scheme I’m using for the game. I’m not going to say too much about it.

I was hoping to have had more time to finish this bit, but unfortunately that’s not been the case.

I have managed to create a blank page in the UI to display the about information on and have included the standalone script I created for the about page in a separate project.

I think all I have to do now is create a check to see if the specific UI page is being displayed where I can call the UpdateAboutPage() function; I also need to create the text for the about page and set the properties of the text.

That’s all for now

I’m afraid that’s all for this update. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the next update.

Game Progress Update #45

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

Things have been a lot more normal this week it feels. There has been no drama, no apocalyptic weather, and I feel like I’ve actually had a reasonable amount of time to work on Flappy-vaders.

I even managed to get a few quotes for repairing the tablet! So fingers crossed 🤞 I’ll be able to get that fixed soon. As much as it’s higher spec, my laptop is a lot heavier and less fun to carry around.

Adverts

I made a start getting the adverts working in Flappy-vaders.

I had already created an AdMob app and a couple of Ad Units, an interstitial advert and a rewarded video advert.

I created a script to contain all the variables and functions related to adverts, and started fleshing it out.

I didn’t bother as yet with asking for GDPR permissions as I’m only using test adverts for now, but I will be adding this at some point in the future. Nor has any consideration been given to IAP advert removal, but this should be a fairly straight forward thing to implement later.

I did however create a function to show an interstitial advert, which is now called when the player has finished reading the Game over screen.

I also created a function to show a rewarded advert, as well as code to check if the video was watched in its entirety or not. If the player successfully watches to the end, they are rewarded with some coins.

The eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed that the button says 100 coins, but the video only rewards 10. This is another thing that will be corrected once I work more on the in game currency and its value.

Bug fixes

The video I shared in Progress Update #44 showed that the code I had written to check each daily mission was different when generating new daily missions was flawed and not working properly.

A closer inspection of the code revealed that the code was only checking missions 1 and 2 and 2 and 3. This of course allowed missions 1 and 3 to be the same.

I fixed this by adding a third check to ensure that 1 and 3 were different as well.

I noticed also that I had added Adverts to the GDD (And also the Trello) twice, once in 4 UI and once again in 7 Monetization. I thought monetization was the best place, as I have little to no direct control over presentation or interactions of the adverts. I’ve updated the Trello and GDD.

Daily Prizes

The last thing I’ve been working on is the Daily Prize scratch cards. Or at least experimenting with their appearance in Paint.net. I find drawing over the actual game elements to help speed up the design process.

I may add a title to the card with an appropriate graphic, but this would mean adding a scroll to the page as the scratch card would be too tall to fit with a title.

Once the card is scratched (all six panels removed), then the game transitions to another screen where the player can either collect the reward or double it by watching a rewarded video.

That’s all for now

And that’s all that I’ve had time for this time round. I’ll be back in two weeks with another update, and hopefully another sizeable chunk of the game done 🙂

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Dev with Dave on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.