Hello World! And welcome to the fifty second Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!
I’ve been doing these updates more or less every two weeks now for two years it seems! (Or by my reckoning anyway, lol). I was hoping to have some brilliant news, some video of the more or less complete game running, or that kind of thing. But sadly, that’s not how the last two weeks have panned out.
Unfortunately my girlfriend was once again taken ill and had to spend most of the last week in hospital.
This meant whatever time I had spare for working on Flappy-vaders was spent sat at the hospital instead.
She’s better now. Well, not a hundred percent, but she is back home and recovering well.
Two years of progress updates
I know I missed a few updates, so I’ve been working on Flappy-vaders for a little longer than two years, but I was still hoping to do something a little special to celebrate the fifty second update.
Instead I will try and do something when I get back to work after the Christmas Holidays.
Christmas
Talking of Christmas, that’s right round the corner. It’s a week tomorrow I think, which means this will be the last Flappy-vaders progress update for a while.
After last year’s fiasco of getting the date wrong, I have checked and double checked to make sure the following is correct! lol.
I’ll be back with the next Flappy-vaders game progress update on Friday, the 20th of January.
Until next time
And that’s it I’m afraid. I’ve had little to no time to do anything else.
As I said above, I’ll be back with another update on the 20th of January.
Until then I wish you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy new year to you all.
Hello World! And welcome to the fifty first Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!
Winter is most definitely here now as December has arrived, and for the first time this year the car bleeped at me to say it was less than 4° outside. As my sister said the other day, its two jumpers weather outside, lol.
Its been a fairly busy time here what with one thing and another. One of the children and their family were moving house and as I have a large car, I was volunteered to help.
As always though, I have managed to find a few hours to get some work done to Flappy-vaders.
Let me tell you what I have done.
Trophies!
Trophies were the last thing still to be started on the Trello. And since I needed to get trophies working in order to finish off the Unread Notifications card, I thought It was a good place to begin for the week.
Now, the GDD was more than a little vague about what the trophies actually are. It describes the process of awarding a trophy and getting the reward, but just says the list of trophies will be determined later. (Super helpful, thanks a lot me.)
I started off by sitting down with a nice hot cup of tea and my trusty pad and pen. It didn’t take me too long to decide on what the ten trophies were*
For some of the trophies, I decided to simply use existing mechanisms that the player is already familiar with because of the daily missions. But for others I’m going to have to create new code to do.
Here is the current list of trophies for those who are interested..
Travel ‘x’ distance 1
Travel ‘x’ distance 2
Collect ‘x’ coins 1
Collect ‘x’ coins 2
Play ‘x’ games 1
Play ‘x’ games 2
Watch credits to the end
Unlock all upgrades
Unlock all pickups
Come back to life
Not all of these trophies will be visible. I’m thinking the credits and the come back to life trophies will have the descriptions hidden.
* I say decided, I am tempted to remove one of the “unlock all” trophies and replace it with something different; but I have a list of ten trophies to work with.
Trophies Script
I created a script for the trophies, then used comment first coding to sketch out all the variables and functrions I would need.
Once I had a basic framework laid out, I started to code the functions. I created functions to setup the trophy names and descriptions, and to load and save any progress made.
I also made a function to set the UI text for the trophy names and descriptions. This code will ultimately also change the image on the trophy panel. To help write this bit, I also (rather hastily) whipped up a locked padlock icon to use.
The next job was to set about implementing winning a trophy. I gave some temporary values to a couple of the trophies so they could be won quickly and easily.
The first trophy i attempted was the distance one. I was initially having problems getting a value for the distance travelled, but soon resolved it. I need to check if the result matches the distance for the daily missions as well.
The trophies relating to coins were the next ones I wrote. This was mostly a simple case of copy and pasting the code which handled the previous trophies.
Lastly I added code to play the same fanfare effect from the daily missions, and to set an unread notification for the trophy in the UI.
At this point I had four out of the ten trophies working properly. I found a problem where I had accidentally used > rather than >= which threw off awarding a trophy or two. But that was easily fixed 🙂
Out of time
And that was pretty much all I have managed to achieve for this update. No matter what card I pick off the Trello they all seem dependent on another unfinished card.
I’m hoping I can get the remaining trophies done and get that card checked off by the next update. That will also mean I can finish the unread notification card as well. The daily prize scratch cards still need finishing. But after that I think all that’s left to do is the In App Purchase stuff.
I’ll be back with one last update on Friday the 16th. It’s update #52, which marks 2 whole years of working on Flappy-vaders and creating these fortnightly updates so expect something special. 🙂 Then I’ll be taking a few weeks off to spend Christmas with my family.
