Game Progress Update #64

Hello world, and welcome to the 64th Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

There wasn’t an update last fortnight as I was having some time away from the keyboard for my Birthday! My girlfriend got us tickets for the Sanctuary Reunion Event and Unit 9, which was amazing! I had the best time with the best people. 😊

However, I forget to mention about it in Update #63. I am old, and it slipped my mind! lol!

This time round I have mostly been working on the promotional video, although it does feel like one of those weeks where I was constantly interrupted and that I could have got more done without them.

Let me tell you about what I have managed to do.

Promotional Video

To recap, I am editing the game to create exactly the video footage I need for the promotional trailer. Before I can start creating what I have started calling the Megazone, I need to get the following tasks done.

• Set the speed to match the music I have already recorded.
• Change the random zone selection so it picks a specific value each time.
• Remove all UI elements and debug text
• Disable the acceleration
• Record all changes (explain the PoopShtein and find all method)

Set the speed

Actually had problems as I had forgotten the music and game speed were independent, and I had in fact just made a note of the music speed, not the target player speed.

Then, once I had realised, I then had to play the game until I could get the music speed to the right value, and see what the player speed was at that time.

Then it was a simple case of finding where both values are set, and changing the initial value.

Disabling the acceleration

This was quite simple, to do. I found the line where the player speed was increased, and commented it out.

I also had to disable the code which increased the music speed. This again was simply commented out once I had located it.

Remove the UI

One of the things recommended for game play footage was the removal of the UI, so as not to distract the viewer.

This was a simple case of commenting out every element on the game ui page.

Stopping random zone selection

As with the above bit, this one was another dead easy one to do. When I was generating the zones originally and needed to test them, I had already implemented a system to allow me to prevent random selection and instead let me manually select which zone is to be used.

Logging changes

Since all of the changes required for creating the footage to use in the promotional video are temporary and will need to be removed once the video is finished, I decided the best thing to do was to log all the changes I made.

As an extra precaution, in the comments of each change, I have left the code-word “PoopShtein”. This may seem random, but it allows me to use the Find All feature to find any reference of the code word in any of the source files in the project.

Creating the Megazone

The megazone is the name I have given to the special zone I am creating to showcase the game in the very hectic first six seconds of the trailer.

The aim is for it to demonstrate most, if not all the aspects of the game in one crazy busy zone.

I’ve finally decided (although this may change) to have the first half to be filled with meteors and anti aircraft guns; and the second, with pipes, coins and missiles.

One of the issues with testing this once I had created it is that the game is set to run very very fast for this, making it insanely difficult to play.

Progress so far

As I said above, I’ve not made as much progress on this as I would have liked. Below is a video showing what I have achieved so far this time round.

It’s only rough, but it gives an indication of what I am aiming for.

Thats all for now

I’m quite late with this update. It’s nearly 10pm now and I still have to do the social media posts for this update yet. So I will leave it there, and I’ll be back in two weeks (I promise, no sneaking off and having another birthday! lol)

Until next time..