Game Progress Update #86

Hello world! And welcome to the eighty sixth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

I’ve had a very different couple of weeks this time round. Following on from the last update, I did have some fun this time round creating assets to use in promotion.

It’s been really hot the last couple of days. You can tell by the air that summer is finally here. I would have spent the week sat outside with the laptop, but I’ve not put the roof back on the Gazebo yet. (It tore whilst being cleaned and needs repair, I’ve got a patch for it but I’ve not had time)

I’m sadly no closer to finding a solution to my publishing dilemma. I have been working with the developers working on AGK Studio over at The Game Creators to find a solution, and hopefully won’t have too long to wait before I have a fix. Until I do however, I am unable to finalise a date to release the game. This is quite a large spanner in the works to be honest, and the quicker it’s resolved, the better.

Anyway, let me tell you about what I have got done this time round.

Recording footage

I first decided to record some over the shoulder style footage of me playing Flappy-vaders on my phone.

I have a camera tripod and a mount to attach a phone to it. So I thought I was fairly well prepared to do what I wanted.

However, it seems my office isn’t ideal for recording video footage. Firstly there is the constant whirring of the fans in my PC. There is also the gurgling of the cat drinking fountain, and the occasional song from Gary the budgie.

A good going over with the vacuum probably wouldn’t have hurt either! 😅

On top of all these problems, I also had issues with knocking the tripod with my feet when it was too close. It would perhaps also be worthwhile to disable the automatic picture settings on the recording device.

Still, considering this was the first time I had tried anything like this, I am fairly happy.

Mockups

The next thing I did was record some game play footage from the PC using OBS. This is intended to be used by itself, or perhaps combined with mock-ups from PlaceIt.

I also intend to record footage from other areas of the game. Such as the scratch cards, the UI, and the trophies list.

As well as video, I have been capturing stills to use for promotion and social media posts.

This footage is all intended to be used for adverts or social media posts.

On reflection, I would have liked to plan out a few screen shots in the same way I did for the footage for the promo trailer. Instead I just took screen grabs at random whilst playing the game.

Bugs!!

I’ve spent so much time playing flappy-vaders this week, that I have found 2 new bugs. I owe the first of these discoveries to PlaceIt not knowing what size images some of their mock-ups need!

According to the website, I needed an image which was 3040 x 1040, where as I actually needed one 3040 x 1456 (or so, I still needed to adjust it slightly in the cropping stage, but it was a much better fit than was suggested by the Mock-up editor.

However, while running the game in the ridiculously wide screen view, I noticed that the score display does not appear to be anchored to the top left corner of the screen.

The second bug relates to the missiles and there laser guided path. I noticed that when a missile is destroyed by the smart bomb pickup, the sprite representing it’s laser path is not destroyed. Neither when the missile is, nor when the rest of the missile paths are destroyed.

I expect the best way to deal with this is to destroy the laser sprite at the same time as the missile itself. This would give a better indication to the player that the missile has been destroyed by the smart bomb.

Both have been reported on the Trello board and will be fixed at some point before release.

That’s all for now

I’m afraid that’s all I’ve had time for this update. The next update which would usually have been on the 5th of July will be late. It’s my birthday on the 4th of July, and I’m taking a well deserved couple of weeks off. (No excuses for not fixing the gazebo and working outside in the shade it provides)

The next Flappy-vaders game progress update won’t be on your feeds until the 19th July 2024.

By which time I should be back, well rested and eager to get on, and of course a year older than I am as I write this, lol.

See you next time

Game Progress Update #85

Hello World! And welcome to the eighty fifth Dev with Dave game progress update.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been a productive week. It was one of the children’s birthday, which was nice, but kept me away from the keyboard.

I also feel like I have been hyper-fixated on getting the email sequence written. I’ve spent practically all of my time this fortnight working on that.

I was hoping to get the bug in the IAP coin pack purchasing fixed, but I am still waiting for an update to the software I use to create the game to fix the current issue with uploading the next build.

Anyway let me tell you about what I have done since the last update.

Email Sequence

As I said above, I have been somewhat fixated on this. Possibly because I had been having difficulty finding the right words for them.

Thinking that it might make things easier if I could see what the emails look like, I opened up a new Brevo account specifically for this. They have a drag and drop visual editor for you to use. So you can see what the email looks like a lot better than you can in Word which I was previously using.

I decided on using a free account for now, but I can upgrade it nearer release if I find my email list becomes too large for the free daily amount of emails it can send. The monthly charge is something like £6 (About $7.60 US) so it’s not a huge amount.

Unfortunately, as I don’t know when the game will be released, I am unable to set the second sequence. This is the one which starts sending mails a few weeks before the release date.

Social Media Leveraging

I’d actually been a bit lapse with this the last few weeks. Despite having a posting schedule, I had neglected posting much and had barely even been interacting.

I’m sure I have said before that I struggle with this aspect of the promotion, as I cannot schedule SM posts in other peoples groups. This means I need to make any posts manually, which I am less than brilliant at remembering to do.

To combat this, I first made sure that both the photos I had taken, and the notes I had made were accessible from my phone. For this I used Microsoft OneDrive for file sharing, and OneNote for note taking. I use both these bits of software regularly and I cannot rate them highly enough.

I have also realised that I could well do with spending some time just creating assets of the game. Things for sharing on social media, like game play footage, or screen shots. I do not feel I have created any where near enough of these just yet.

At least one of the groups I am using for this aspect of promotion uses #ScreenShotSaturday. So it would make sense to capitalise on this also.

Delays

As I said earlier in the post, the project is currently being held back by several factors.

The first, and probably most frustrating, is that I am waiting for the software I used to create the game to be updated. I have access to a test build of the software, as the current build is using an out of date Billing library. However the test build has an issue with the compilation process which means that my game does not work.

Because of this I am unable to upload the next build for testing. So I don’t know if I have fixed the IAP issue or not.

This is also affecting any plans I had for advertising. Although I have not yet managed to get all the copy ready, a lot of the promotion needs to know what date the game is released in order to maximise the effectiveness of the advertising.

That’s all for now

And that is all I have time for this time round. I have a feeling the next couple of weeks will be fun as I will try and create some new graphical and video assets for social media, as well as hopefully finishing off the copy for the email sequences.

I might be lucky and be able to upload and test the next build, assuming that the issue with AGK Studio are fixed in time.