Game Progress Update #94

Game Progress Update #94

Hello world, and welcome to the ninety fourth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

It’s very nearly Halloween, and that means Christmas is only round the corner! The dark nights of winter are drawing in, and soon I will have to think about putting the heating on.

As for Flappy-vaders, this Update is once again primarily about marketing. I was hoping to also get some coding done and try and fix some of the bugs on the Trello board’s Known bugs/Issues list, but we all know what happens when I plan on doing something in my spare time… 🙄 I think for the next update I shall just hope that I get.

Talking of the next update, The usual update won’t be in two weeks time, Instead the next Flappy-vaders update will be the 22nd of November. I’m once again having a well earned break away from the keyboard.

Anyway, let me tell you what I’ve been up to with regards to getting the game ready for launch.

Social media assets

My plan for the social media posting is to use a selection of stills and videos to demonstrate or explain various aspects of the game, in combination with the mockup images I have already produced from PlaceIT.

After sit down, a think, and a refreshing cup of tea, I decided to use a format similar to the promotional video I made a while back. That is to use the background scrolling animation of the game, as well as other assets to demonstrate aspects of the game, like pickups, etc.

The above is a mock up of a potential image. On social media, this could be accompanied by a longer text adding further explanation. I am going to set about making some more of these, and experiment with some subtle animations in the video. Things like text sweeping onscreen, or the pick up icon zooming in or wobbling slightly. That sort of thing.

When creating artwork I find it helps enormously when you have to tweak or edit them months down the line, to have written down things like font name and size, the screen resolution used, etc.

These may all seem obvious to you now, but in six months down the like, you may have a different opinion.

Email sequences

As I said in the last update, the auto branding detector didn’t work. So before I set to work on the email sequences, I logged into the FV website and wrote down the hex codes for the colours used on the site. Then I headed back over to the Brevo website to carry on with creating the email sequences.

I also needed to provide a copy of the logo, but that was also quite straight forward to do.

A picture of the brevo email editior

Fortunately the brevo email editor looks to be a fairly simple to use drag and drop editor.

I must admit it did take me slightly longer than I would have liked to have worked out how to use the editor, but I did manage to get the first email of the first sequence created.

However, once I tested it, it did seem to go straight to the junk mail folder of the email address it was sent to. This was despite having set the DNS records earlier to prevent this from happening and the email address it was sent to had confirmed a desire to receive emails.

Not ideal 🙁

I have decided to add a notice to both the “Thanks for signing up” page of the website, and the first email suggesting that the player adds the info@flappy-vaders.co.uk email address to their list of safe senders.

And that’s all for now.

Time is as always against me. And that it seems is all the time I have for this update. I will be back as I said earlier, not next fortnight, but the one after (22/11/2024).

I hope you all have a spooky Halloween, and I’ll catch you all soon.

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #93

Game Progress Update #93

Hello World! And welcome to the ninety third Dev with Dave game progress update.

It’s been another week of glorious sunshine, followed by torrential rain, then more sunshine. I’ve been using whatever spare time I can to work on the game.

It’s also been another week of family stuff taking precedence over me spending time to work on Flappy-vaders. This included a couple of hours one afternoon clothes shopping with one of the children. This involved what felt like hours of walking round shops, but I was rewarded with a Dungeons & Dragons Lego minifig from a mystery box.

It’s also been another week of family stuff taking precedence over me spending time to work on Flappy-vaders. This included a couple of hours one afternoon clothes shopping with one of the children. This involved what felt like hours of walking round shops, but I was rewarded with a Dungeons & Dragons Lego minifig from a mystery box.

Anyway, let me tell you what I have managed to do this week.

Bug fixing

The problem with the IAP still exists. The AGK developers are aware of it, and hopefully it will be resolved in the next AGK update. I only mention this now as I have been testing the game looking for more bugs, and when I was demonstrating the bug to my buddy, everything worked fine! Typical.

I would prefer to have this bug fixed before the game launches, but I equally want the game to be released as soon as all the assets for the promo plan are ready.

Email sequences

I did some more to configuring things associated with Brevo and the email sequences I plan on sending to subscribers.

As I said in the last update >here< configuring the DMARC and DKIM settings for the domain still needed doing.

I was working from my new laptop last time, and didn’t have the login details handy which I needed to do this. I made sure that didn’t happen this week.

It wasn’t a big job to configure the DKIM and DMARC settings for the domain. I had to log into the hosting providers website and add a couple of new records to the DNS settings. Brevo had a fairly easy to follow guide which I made full use of.

A screen shot of the Brevo create campaign process

The next stumbling block was with the branding. Brevo offers a system which can determine the logo, colours, fonts, etc. from your website. But this didn’t seem to work too well with the Flappy-vaders website. Possibly as it’s a single page WordPress.

The next job I have is to manually set up all these values, before I can finally get the email copy entered, and can see what it will all look like.

Social Media and Asset Planning

What with the Flappy-vaders social media which needs to start now ideally, and the adverts which I would also like to start as soon as everything is ready, there is an awful lot of assets I need to make.

This is the sort of thing I have been considering whilst I’m away from the computer. Rather than just doom-scrolling while I’m waiting for the kids outside a shop, or in the car, I have been looking through social media for posts which leap out at me and stop me scrolling. I then consider what it is which made me stop scrolling and whether I can adapt or utilise this in my own posts.

I already have a small selection of stills which were created from blank mockups, some video of me playing the game, and some video which were created by AI. All of these are good starting points, but I’m not sure they are good enough yet.

I think I will use the email copy as a basis for some of the social media posts, which would posted shortly after the emails get sent out.

And that’s all for now

I’m afraid I have once again run out of time for this week. I will be back next fortnight with another game progress update.

In the mean time I will be working hard on getting this marketing stuff done ready for a big promotional push before the game is released.

Until next time 🙂