Game Progress Update #97

Hello world! And welcome to the ninety seventh Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

I’m afraid this might not be the longest post this time round as Christmas is right round the corner, and my week has been completely messed around by my car being in for repair all week. What originally was supposed to have been a 2 day job seems to have taken twice that already, and I still don’t have my car back yet. I was told earlier today that the Garage would call after 2pm to say the car was ready. It’s currently 20 past 4, and I have still heard nothing.

I did however buy myself two of the Dungeons and Dragons Lego minifigs, the elf bard, and the Mindflayer! (With his adorable little pet brain)

Formalising the promotional plan

I feel like I have been working a lot on getting the promotional plan for the release of Flappy-vaders, but I equally feel like I haven’t achieved very much.

I’m still trying to decide the very best way to spend the limited budget I have to promote this game, after the budget I had planned was slashed by circumstances beyond my control.

• Social media
• Email sequences
• Paid adverts

I know I said I was going to formalise the promotional plan, and publish it here as an post for you all to read. I have not yet managed to do this, but it is on the cards for the new year. However, here is a brief run down of my plan to promote the game.

There will be a period of a few weeks to a month, which will be the “Pre-launch” period. During this I will run adverts which guide users to the website to leave their email address if interested in the game.

At this point, I will also start posting regularly on the Flappy-vaders social media, with the videos and images I have been creating the last few weeks. I will also start posting in relevant groups with my own profile, building up relationships and occasionally mentioning the game if it seems appropriate.

The email sequences will be triggered when a user leaves their address. The emails welcome new users, with the second email encouraging users to like/follow us on social media.

Once launch day arrives and the final email gets sent, then I will switch the adverts over to ads which point to the store page, with the intention of getting downloads.

Promotional material

I have not managed to get any new videos or images created this week. Literally all my spare time has been taken up with shopping for Christmas, decorating the house, and waiting patiently for the car to come back from the garage.

The picture above is from Monday last week, when the car had to have it’s annual MOT inspection, which it failed due to a few minor faults and needing several of the shock absorbers replaced.

That’s all for now

I’m hoping that this is the last time I’ll be going to the local shopping centre this year! lol. I’m not a fan of shopping at the best of times, let alone in the Christmas crowds, when the world and his dog seems to rush out and spend all day milling around outside shops.

Still, it’s over now. The car finally came back home, with a pass certificate. All I have left to do is finish this blog post, wrap up some presents and enjoy the big day on Wednesday.

I’ll be back in the new year, with the next Game Progress Update being due on the 17th of January.

In the mean time, I hope you all have an amazing Christmas, and a happy new year!

Game Progress Update #96

Hello World, Welcome to the ninety sixth Dev with Dave game progress update.

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks, with Christmas looming round the corner, and all the preparation which goes along with that. (I’m dreading how the kittens will be once we get the Christmas tree set up! lol).

It’s also a sad time, as yesterday evening, as Aurora, one of our cats, passed away. She was around 16 years old. We were given Aurora back in 2009 when we moved into the house we live in now.

She was very quiet, and kept herself to herself mostly. She certainly did not try and hog the lime light like some of the other cats, and seemed to have avoided the cameras through the years. I will miss her terribly.

Anyway, carrying on from the >last update<, I’ve mostly been focusing on creating assets to use in social media for the pre-launch period of the game. Creating short video assets which will be posted individually, and combined with other videos to make longer ones.

Video assets

Carrying on from the last update, I have been making more of the videos to demonstrate various aspects of the game on social media.

It took me a few hours overall, to modify the game in preparation of recording footage.

As with all the previous videos I’ve recorded for the game, I have hidden the UI from the recording. It’s perhaps a little late now, but I have decided that I should have added a variable to act as a flag so I could just set it to true, and have the UI elements repositioned for video recording. But as I’m best part done with recording footage, it’s probably too late to worry about this now.

Making the videos themselves is fairly straight forward. Especially now I have the timings written down. It is time consuming though. Assuming capturing the in game footage doesn’t take too long, and I don’t make any silly mistakes in the post production editing, I can make around 4 ten second videos with the Icon then game play footage, as well as four videos with just the text and icon, and a still image for each as well.

The score multiplier video was a bit of a pain however, as it’s not easy to demonstrate a score multiplier.

As you can see in the image, simply unhiding the score element of the UI clashed with the positioning of the text overlay. This made the score hard to see, and did not fit with the purpose of the video.

I took a few minutes out to go for a walk and think about how to solve the problem.

Ultimately I decided to increase the size of the score display text and position it more clearly in front of the player ship.

I’m not entirely happy with the solution, as it will make this one hard to render in other aspect sizes. (I’m planning on having all the videos done in 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16.

Even more bugs discovered

Everything seemed to be going largely ok while I was recording the footage for the pickups. However that all seemed to change when I started recording footage for the boost videos.

First of all I discovered that if you crashed while the head start boost is active, the shield sound does not get stopped.

Then, when I was recording footage for the self destruct boost, I noticed that not only the initial explosion not have a sound effect, but neither did any of the bounces when the ship impacts the ground.

I also suspect the Self destruct boost might be a little OP…

All the bugs have been added to the Trello Known bugs/issues list, which you can see >here<. There is a few now, and most of them look quite simple to fix. I shall really have to set aside a day to fix them all soon.

That’s all for now.

And that’s all for now.

I will be back in two weeks for the last Flappy-vaders game progress update of the year. After that I will be taking some time off to celebrate Christmas with my friends.

See you later 🙂