Game Progress Update #50

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

After checking the Trello It seems that its only really the trophies that I still need to start. I have four things which have been started but remain unfinished in the in-progress list. So, my goal is to get as many of the in-progress things checked off as possible 🙂

Whether I’ll succeed or not is another thing. I wish I had included an IAP section in the GDD, and I may still add it. The adverts card would have been moved to the under-review tab by now if the IAP stuff was on its own card. Oh well, lol

Anyway, Let me tell you about what I have managed to get done this time round.

Advert Consent Dialogue

Thanks to privacy laws and regulations, like GDPR etc. It’s important to give users of your app the option as to whether you show them targeted ads or not.

For this I simply used the default text that we always use when creating a privacy/consent page for an app or game at Warriors of the Cucumber.

Scrolling down the page takes the player to three buttons, which represents the choices available. To use your data to show you more relevant adverts, or not; or to purchase the removal of the ads all together.

Right at the bottom there is a link to the privacy policy. Again, I am using the standard policy which we use for every release.

The yes/no buttons are now completely functional, as is the privacy policy button. I made a start on the Ad removal buttons functionality but couldn’t do too much as I haven’t written any IAP code as yet.

In App Purchasing

Starting from the Google Play Developers console, I added the first of the IAP products.

The game will ultimately have five in app products for the player to purchase. These are to remove the adverts, and for each one of the coin packs.

I created the advert removal product so I can write some more code in the game to setup and handle IAP purchases.

Next I wasted thirty minutes creating an In App Purchase script for the game, not realising that I had already made one earlier in the development and simply didn’t notice it when I created the new one.

*Sigh* These late nights are catching up with me it seems, lol.

Then I added a function to the script to Setup the IAP Products. This will be expanded upon when I create the other IAP Products but is done enough for now.

I didn’t have time to write any more for this, but the next bit is to write some functionality to the buy Ad removal button and make a start on the IAP process.

Daily Prizes

Last of all I managed to carry on from the last update get some more work done to the Daily prizes screen.

This involved optimising some functions which were specific to the daily missions count down timer, to allow them to be used for the new scratch card count down as well.

I also created functions to load and save the countdown data and number of cards the player holds, and to update the countdown timer on screen.

Now the player receives a new card every day when the timer expires.

And that’s all for now!

There we go, that’s all I have managed for now. I’m super happy that so much of the game is almost finished.

I will be back in two weeks with another update. I’m hoping to have most if not all of the current started tasks finished, and maybe even have made a decent start on the trophies! But we’ll have to see, lol. It entirely depends on how much time I have to spend on this.

Game Progress Update #49

Hello World! And welcome to the forty ninth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

I definitely get the feeling that I underestimated the amount of time that getting the rest of the scratch cards working. Although I have made great progress this time round, I’ve not managed to complete the scratch cards entirely.

I had hoped to get done a few other things done for this update, but sadly I didn’t get to touch on these too much.

Anyway, let me tell you about the stuff I have managed to get done.

Scratchcard Progress

Carrying on from where we left off in Update 48, the first job this time round was to take my pen and paper sketch of the Daily prizes screen and mock it up in an art package. I do this so I can work out the exact size of the UI elements

The important elements on this page were as follows

• The total count of scratch cards the player has
• Time remaining until another free card is awarded
• Play scratch card button
• A list of fruit combinations and prizes

Which I think I have managed to do quite well.

(Sorry the font looks funky, I couldn’t find the correct font details and rather than delay things by having a proper hunt for them, I just pressed ahead using something similar from memory)

Creating the screen

Having created the graphics and saved out the individual sprites I needed, it was time to start creating the screen inside the game.

I cannot state enough how handy the Percentage Resolution Tool was for loading and displaying the sprites correctly using AGK Studios percentage resolution system.

This looks great so far I think. Once I had the buttons and stuff in place it was time to make them all functional.

When I implemented scrolling to the page I found a minor issue with the ui element depths, but that was quickly sorted out.

All the other UI pages need the top bar sprites to have the depths adjusted otherwise the rest of the page elements appear over them when scrolling. This has been a thing since the beginning and I have a function which sorts it automatically. I just needed to add the new page to the list of sprites to have the depth adjusted.

I could not decide whether to create the prize list in the art package or to create it programatically, so instead I just created a temporary graphic so I could get a feel for the size of the image. The current temporary image has a 16px margin, 32px for text at the top, then twenty 32px panels of alternating colour. This will do until I can decide how best to do this. (I’m leaning toward programatically at present)

New Functionality

I created a few new variables in the scratcher type. These are to store the number of scratch cards that the player currently owns, the time that the next free scratch card is to be awarded, and another timer which is to limit the number of rewarded ads the player can watch in one day.

It was quite easy to hook the play scratch card button up to the code I had previously used to start a scratch card as I had simply commented it out.

I also added code to update the scratch card count on the display, and to decrease this value whenever a scratch card is played.

There was a little difficulty getting the rewarded ads to work properly, but this turned out to be a case of me needing to RTFM.

I also added functions which loaded and saved the data relating to number of scratch cards and rollover times.

Lastly I added the code necessary to complete the daily mission to get a daily prize (play a scratch card). This was straight forward to add because I had already written most of the code and simply needed to add a line of code to call a function.

As an encore (and so I could move the card from the in progress column to the completed column of the Trello board) I found and implemented a chip-tune style fanfare to play whenever the player completes a daily mission.

Things I didn’t manage to do..

As I said above, I fear I underestimated how long this would take to get working.

I couldn’t decide on the best way to determine winning combinations of fruit in time. The fruit are currently chosen at random, and the IDs are stored in an array in the scratcher type, and there is no code to determine if the card is a winner or what the prize will be.

I still need to devise and implement some method to notify the player of what they won. This will probably be a panel which appears over the scratch card when the player scratches 80% (ish) of each panel off.

And I didn’t get the timed stuff working with the scratch cards. Although this should be straight forward enough to copy/adapt from the code which resets the daily missions.

Thats all for now

Sadly, I’ve run out of time. I was hoping this update would be done for the 4:30pm deadline I aim for every time, but today had other plans! Still I’m only a few hours late today 🙂

I will be back as always with another update for you, where I’m hoping to have finished the scratch cards, and maybe even made a start on getting the IAP of currency to work.

See ya

Dave 🙂