Game Progress Update #55

Hello World! And welcome to the fifty fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

I’ve had another couple of great weeks when it comes to working on Flappy-vaders. After the rather embarrassing cock up with the Scratch cards for the daily prizes from the last post, I’m happy to announce that the scratch cards are finally finished and working!

Finishing the scratch cards

I didn’t really have a plan for how to handle the win/lose at the end of a scratch card. I spent several hours looking into how other games and websites did the scratch cards. But sadly didn’t really find much that was helpful.

I also tried to play Dice with Buddies scratch cards, but I didn’t have time to win any of the cards, and I didn’t much fancy spending real world money just for this.

So I started playing around in Paint.net. Trying to create a mockup of how I imagine the win/lose screen would look and work.

The first mockup I created is above. It has two lines of text, it displays the fruit the player got to win the prize, and also what the prize is.

Writing some code

First off, I created some new variables in the existing scratcher type. These are to track how many panels have been scratched off already.

I also wrote a function to calculate and populate these variables.

It didn’t take too long to create the win/lose dialogue box using existing media. I had to create the back panel specifically, but it wasn’t a long job.

Next came some functions to show and hide the dialogue when required. And some bug fixing to make all the new code work smoothly.

Other Things

I also started adding Phase 2 things to the to do list on the Trello.

Phase two is basically balancing the game play and other aspects of the game, as well as adding polish. Now that I have finished the scratch cards, the only things left to finish before Phase two can begin, are the In App Purchase bits for the ad removal and buying currency.

That’s all for now.

But as always, that is all I have got time for now. I’m already over an hour and half past the deadline for this blog, so I’d best sign off and go and cook some dinner.

I’ll be back as always in two weeks, and hopefully I’ll have finished the last few cards in the In Progress column on the Trello.

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #54

Hello World! And welcome to the fifty fourth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

I’m not sure how, but I have managed to get an absolute pile of work done on the game these last two weeks. I don’t think I’ve been any less busy than usual with other things. Quite the opposite, as it was my girlfriends birthday last weekend and I did the catering for the party, and made and decorated (although badly, lol) a cake.

I think it’s just being refreshed from the Christmas hols 🙂 Anyway, without further ado, let me tell you what I’ve managed to get done.

About Text Scroller

I started by going back to the About text system which I had left unfinished at the end of the last Progress Update.

I tweaked the text scrolling system a little. Introducing variables to replace hard coded values left over from the original proof of concept code. This also made it easier to change the font size, as I needed to increase the size of the text to make it easier to read.

I found an issue when I started adding to the text, where the start/end of the text message would overlap. I fixed this by replacing another fixed value, with a formula to calculate the size of the text body using the text size and the number of lines. This still needs polish, as I think there is too much white space at the beginning and end.

Trophies

Trophies were next on the list of things to do. I had noticed that the GDD said that the player will receive a coin reward for completing a trophy. This was missed from the original system when it was written.

I decided on having three tiers of rewards for the trophies, depending on how hard the challenge was. Easy trophies reward the player with 10 coins, Harder ones with 50 coins; and the most challenging will give the player 100 coins if they manage to complete it.

I added a new property to the trophies type to store the reward in. As well as a line of code to add the reward to the players coin total.

Currency

During my more AFK moments I have been considering how to structure the coin bundles which will be available for the player to purchase.

The goal was always for the entry level purchase to be £0.99 (about $1.20 us or €1.11), and for the top end coin pack to contain enough coins to unlock/upgrade every pickup and powerup.

I calculated that it takes 1500 coins to upgrade an item to maximum. And there are 8 different items to upgrade, so total upgrades would cost 12,000 coins.

Using this information, I decided on the following details for the coin packs.

• Coin pack 1 – 500 coins for £0.99
• Coin pack 2 – 3000 coins for £4.99
• Coin pack 3 – 7500 coins for £9.99
• Coin pack 4 – 20000 coins for £19.99

It didn’t take me long to add this data to the coin store page in the game. Then came time to add the in app purchase code.

In App Purchasing

I had already added one product to the developer console for the Ad removal. Adding four more for the coin packs wasn’t any bother at all.

Once I had set up the console side of things, the next task was to add the code to handle actually purchasing.

This wasn’t as straight forward as I’d hoped as the IAP commands have changed in AGK Studio since I last used them.

I think I have a handle on how the IAP stuff works now, but I need to test it on the device before I can do too much more on this.

Problems

I managed to find two new problems this update. The first no doubt was due to me being sleepy/forgetful (Which does happen tbh. I wrongly stated that the scratch cards were complete in the trello.

I actually have a fair bit of work to do to finish these. So I have dragged the card back into the In Progress column.

The second problem was that the quit button in the pause menu doesn’t work. Although hopefully, this will be a cinch to fix.

That’s all for now

And with that, we have reached the end of another progress update. I will be back in two weeks with another. So I’ll see you all then 🙂