Game Progress Update #76

Hello World, and welcome to the seventy sixth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I’ve not managed to get quite as much done as I would have liked to do.

It was my girlfriends birthday at the end of last month. She had a lovely day, we had a party in the evening with drinks, a buffet and a few friends. Unfortunately, she overdid things and has been laid up on the sofa with a bad back since.

I also have been suffering with a toothache the last couple of days. This has not helped my concentration or my ability to work on the game.

On the plus side, It’s a lot warmer now. I hope that the worst of the winter is over. I am looking forward to getting out with the laptop or tablet.

It would sure be nice to get some coding done without Khaleesi getting in the way, lol

Anyway, let’s see what I managed to get done this week…

In this update..

I managed to get an amazing amount done in the >previous update<. I left only one card still to do in the in progress column of the >Trello board<.

• Level difficulty

I also planned on trying to get some of the new bugs which had appeared recently fixed also. Sadly, fate had other ideas.

Level difficulty

Despite spending most of my spare time this update thinking about how to adjust the level difficulty. There is little to show for it here but a few scribbled ideas on paper,

I refuse point blank to scan in 4 pages of notes (and awful handwriting) and use that for the blog! I think I have left it a little late to mock some of the ideas up in paint.net or the game itself to demonstrate the ideas.

Initially I was thinking that I may increase the gaps between obstacles in relation to the speed of the players ship. I think if this was proportional, it would still give the impression that the game was getting harder. It would be a gentler transition for the player however.

I am now leaning towards having several sets of levels which are only selected if the speed is inside a specific range. Even if this means having 2 or 3 similar levels which simple have larger spacing between the objects.

Social media leveraging

I had a quick run through of the Facebook groups I had considered as potential groups for marketing my game in. Of the six I originally selected, I have decided that four are ideal for my needs.

As I said in >this previous blog post<, it is important when you join a new group to interact and get to know the community before trying to promote your game. Any group with active administration will frown upon newcomers who just spam the group with promotional material.

I have developed a posting plan for each of the groups. These plan out over the next few weeks, a number of posts which fit the group which I shall be posting. I will also try and comment on a handful of other peoples posts in the group as well.

I don’t expect I will post anything about my game in any of these groups for a month or two yet.

And that’s all I’m afraid..

That’s all there is I’m afraid. It’s time to publish this post, and share the social media posts. As much as I’d love to squeeze in a couple more hours working on the game, I need to do other things.

Fingers crossed, I will be able to do much more to the game in time for the next update. I also hope that the universe won’t throw quite so many obstacles in the way.

Until next time…

Progress Update #75

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

I started writing this post on Monday of this week. This was the first time I managed to get a few hours spare to work on Flappy-vaders since before Christmas. Which feels like it was ages ago now.

As with any project after a few weeks break, I first need to refamiliarise myself with where I was last. Fortunately, the last progress update was a big help with reminding me. I also had the Trello board and the notes I kept using OneNote.

Coming back to a project after a break of a few weeks is still one of my least favourite things as a developer though.

Jobs for this week

Looking back over the last few blogs, I realise that the cards in the Things to do list on the Trello are increasing at almost the same rate that I am completing them! I am unsure if these are actually vital to improve the quality of the game, or if this is perfectionism creeping in.

I will keep an eye on this, as I don’t want to be creating work for works sake. However, currently in the In progress list are the following tasks which I will be trying to get done this update.

• Level difficulty
• Add timers to rewarded ads
• More scratch card skins
• Balance trophies

I’m sure I won’t get all these done this time round, but I feel confident and I will give it my best shot.

Rewarded Advert Button Timers:

Most of the work had already been done for this. I’d mentioned previously that both rewarded ad buttons work in different ways. So one of the first things I did was to ensure both worked the same way.

I added code to update the countdown text and return it to the usual message when it had expired. I also added a check to the button press code to check if the timer had expired or not.

Once I’d finished, I noticed that the timer on the Daily prize screen was displaying seemingly random times (certainly not the 5 minutes I was expecting! lol). But it didn’t take much debugging to discover I had missed a variable name when copying and pasting code and at one point it was checking the coinsAdvertTimer variable instead. Correcting this fixed all the issues, so it’s time to put the card in the Under Review column and move on to the next job.

New skins for scratch cards

I had a quick google for free images, and found a few which I could use to complete the task quickly.

I then set about in paint.net assembling these assets and creating new skins for the scratch cards.

The first one I did was the Jack O Lantern one. This uses a palette of reds and oranges with a black contrast. The carved pumpkin image

Thirdly I made the UFO one. This used a more grey scale palette, and featured an image of a UFO I again found on the internet.

Lastly, I made the gem stone one. This was the most involved to make, and features a green/blue palate.

I noticed as I was working on the above image to show off the four together, that it says match 3 to win on all of them, when instead, it should probably say match 2.

I will change the text next time I open Paint.net.

Balance trophies & missions

The next job was to play a few dozen games of Flappy-vaders, and to see how I got on with the dailies and the missions.

Obviously, I had already given some thought to the targets of the missions and trophies. I had recently done some work on changing the mission values so that they were more optimised. Today I will be looking at the trophies side of things.

One of the things I wanted to avoid was grouping of the awards. For example, the travel distance daily, score points daily and the travel distance trophies could all (and in fact did when I first implemented them) be awarded at the same time.

Instead, I would much rather a nice even spread of awards to help with the longevity of the game.

The table below lists the updated daily missions, how the targets are calculated, and the missions and targets.

Dailies

Trophies

I’m happy with how spaced out the awards are now, so I am going to put this card in the under review list on the Trello.

As I have also been playing with the sound muted, I think it might be worthwhile to add a visual indication that a trophy and/or a daily mission had been completed. Otherwise without the fanfare, it is very hard to tell that the award has been won.

I don’t know however whether to add it during the game, and visually notify as well as playing the sound. Or add a line of text (and maybe a particle effect or flashing colours) to the game over screen?

Bugs and Known issues

On top of the “Collect `n` daily prizes” mission not displaying the number of prizes the player needed to collect. I also found another bug, which I added to the Known bugs and issues column of the Trello.

This one relates to the about scroller. When the about button is pressed, the CRT border and scanlines disappear. I have a feeling this was a result of editing the game to record footage. In the trailer I recorded for the game, the scanlines and CRT border were removed from the game, and then added again in the video post processing. I am hoping it will be a relatively quick fix, but it will have to wait till next week now.

That’s all for this week

That seems to be all the time I have this week to work on the game. I am happy I have got a lot done, and that there is only one card left in the In Progress list.

There are also now 4 cards in the Known bugs/Issues list which I will endeavor to fix in the next update as well.

In the next update I will also discuss how I have been trying to leverage the social media groups I joined before Christmas to try and build the audience for the game.

Anyway, until then. I will see you all in a couple of weeks.