Game Progress Update #69

Hello World! And welcome to the sixty ninth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It seems I am still having to put in an extra hour a day at least playing “Dad’s taxi” and dropping off the kids places when I would rather be working on Flappy-vaders.

Or at least I was until yesterday, when the car broke down on the side of the road. *sigh*

It’s probably going to be at least a week till I can get the car looked at, which is unfortunate. But at least it means I have fewer excuses for not working on the game! lol.

Let me tell you about what I have done this update.

Stutter during gameplay

The last Known bug/issue card in the In Progress column on the Trello was Stutter during gameplay.

This card was added to the Known bugs/issues column on the 1st march 2023, so it’s a fairly recent issue. It does specifically say on the card that the issue occurs on mobile during testing.

I have a feeling that this was relating to some screen settings which I altered a while back when I noticed that the game was running at 120fps on the Android test device I was using.

I spent several hours testing for this, (Does this really count as work? lol.) And unfortunately I have been unable to replicate the issue. The test team have also put a few hours into playing the game and haven’t mentioned any stuttering.

It definitely still happens on the PC, but as the game is targeted for mobile, I am going to mark this card as finished, and move it over to the Under Review column.

Phase 2

Having completed all of the initial stuff, by all accounts I should warrant some kind of celebration, followed by a break. But I feel like the project has taken too long as it is, so instead I’m going to dive straight into Phase 2.

Phase 2 is what I call the next step in the games development. Now all the systems are working as intended, it is time to work on developing the longevity of the game.

Although Flappy-vaders is designed to be played casually, in short bursts while waiting for the bus, or the microwave. There are aspects to keep players returning to the game. The upgrade/boost stores, the trophies, the prize scratchers etc.

I want to add a system to increase the difficulty of the challenges for the daily missions. As well as the rewards after the player has completed a few missions. This will have maybe five grades of difficulty/reward.

I also want to add timers to the reward ads and buttons. These are to limit the number of times the player can get a free daily scratch card.

I also want to ensure that the trophies are balanced. Currently I feel that they are all achievable too quickly.

Lastly there are a few changes I have decided to make to the UI.

I have added all these cards to the Trello, and assigned a couple to the In progress column.

First Phase 2 card completed!

Apparently I had the Fix bugs in Known bugs/issues column as a card in the Things To Do as part of Phase 2, lol.

As I have spent the last several weeks working through the list of bugs, and fixing them all, I think I can mark this one off as completed.

They all still need reviewing, and moving over to the completed column. But that’s a job for another day. I have created a card in the Trello for it.

Another test version uploaded

As all the bugs (That I was aware of anyway) had been fixed, it seemed like an ideal time to compile and upload a new version to the store.

If you already have Flappy-vaders installed, then it will automatically update soon. If not head over to the store page and update it from there.

That’s all for now.

As always I will be back in two weeks with the next update. Hopefully I will have a couple of phase 2 items crossed off the list.

If you want to join the test team, then its not to late. Just drop me a message on any of the channels, or simply email. I’ll get back to you soon.

Until then..

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #68

Hello world, and welcome to the sixty eighth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It’s not been the best couple of weeks for working on this. As you all know, I am doing it in my spare time, and unfortunately my girlfriend is once again laid up with a bad back. Which means that I have not had anywhere near as much free time as I would have liked.

Combine that with running “Dad’s Taxi” for the children who seem to have had an abundance of appointments, and you’ll end up with a slightly stressed Dave who hasn’t had much chance to work on Flappy-vaders.

Throw in a week of ridiculous weather as well, and you start to get an idea of how this last two weeks have gone.

Fortunately we have the Hot tub set up in the garden still (It’s usually packed away by now) so I have been able to cool off in the water on the worst of the hot days.

Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. Let me get on and tell you about what I have done to the game this update.

The plan for this fortnight

After all the bugs I got fixed in the last update, here are only two bugs left in the known bugs/issues column on the Trello board.

• Distance Issues
• Stutter during gameplay

I am hoping to get both of these fixed and maybe even have time to start on the Phase 2 stuff.

Distance issues

I’m hoping this will be a simple bug to fix, so I have chosen this to be the first thing I look at.

The problem is that the Daily missions and the Trophies seem to check the distance travelled differently. For example, I completed a daily mission (Travel 25m), but the Trophy (Travel 25m) was not.

I need to look to see whether the code which compares the distances in the two cases is the same, or at least using the same calculation to work out distance.

Step one is to look and find where the two checks are made. This involves simply reading through the code and following its order of execution. Although its not a particularly fun or interesting thing to do.

I found the code which updated the daily mission distance variable in the IncreasePlayerScore() function. It is increased by 1 every time the player travels 144px (in game size), it’s the size of an old 4:3 TV episode on a widescreen device.

The other piece of the riddle was in the Trophies script. It was however calculating the distance in a completely different way.

Once I had found the issues, it was a fairly simple job to get both sets of code producing the same results.

Stutter during gameplay

Sadly I didn’t get this one finished this update. I managed to get as far as thinking about how I am going to determine what is causing it.

I haven’t even managed to grab any video of it happening. As I cannot replicate the issue on demand as yet. Intermittent problems are the worst kind.

I’m certain AGK Studio has some commands for performance checking. I will look into those and see if they might be helpful for this.

Phase 2

I did manage to get some thought put into Phase 2 however during some AFK time.

Phase 2 is mostly about adding longevity to the game play. I will be adding systems to increase the reward and difficulty of the daily missions; as well as looking into how we can adapt the levels depending on the speed of the player.

I’m leaning towards creating more levels and then give each level a speed rating, so the are not selected if the game is going to quickly or slowely. Then I just need to create several sets of levels so no variety is lost as the player speeds up.

Anyway, I shall talk more about phase 2 once the stuttering bug has been resolved.

That’s all for now

Once again I have run out of time, and the deadline for publishing this blog post draws near. So I shall sign off for now. I’ll be back in two weeks, with another fun packed and exciting* game progress update.

See you all next time!

* May not actually be fun packed or exciting

Game Progress Update #67

Hello World, and welcome to the sixty seventh Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

Thankfully this time round I did manage to find some time to work on Flappy vaders. Since I started this project I have definitely had a lot less free time to work on it than I expected.

But I don’t think I’ve done too badly. The game really does seem to be taking shape. And it definitiely helps with motivation knowing tha the end is nearly in sight! 🙂

Let me tell you what I have done this time round.

The plan for this fortnight

So this fortnight I am back on the bug fixes. There are three bugs in the In progress column of the Trello. Now I have finished working on the promotional video, I shall attempt to finish them off as well.

• Bullet X speed issue.
• Upgrades store issue.
• Scratch card prize issue.

Before I can do anything, I must remove the edits I made for the video in the previous progress update.

Removing the edits.

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve employed two methods to help make removing the edits I’d previously made a little easier.

Firstly I have written a log in my OneNote of the changes I made. And secondly, I have used a Keyword in the comments so I can ctrl-f and find each edited section.

This only took an hour or so to complete, using the keyword to search for changes. If I discover any further issues, I will refer back to the log of code edits.

Scratch card prize issue

When the player gets two pairs on a scratch card, the game awards the lowest prize value. This seems wrong to me, and the player should be awarded the highest.

I fixed this by reversing the direction that the game searched through the fruit by value. This way the player should be awarded the prize with the greatest value.

I would like to say that this is done, but I would be irresponsible to just leave it without testing it. I’ve obviously ran it a few times now just to make sure it worked ok. But statistically, the chances of getting a pair of pairs is remote, and I have run out of daily prize cards. Because of this I have decided to edit the code so I can control the outcome.

I altered two lines to get the game working closer to how I wanted. I changed the line which selected the random fruit from random[0,9] to random[0,1] so only two possible fruits could be selected.

The second line was one to award myself an extra 10 game cards every time I run the app 😉 lol. I will be removing this line before the next test build is released.

Then all I had to do was play a few scratch cards until I got one with two pairs. Then see which prize it awarded me. It didn’t take too many turns until I found one, and I could verify the code worked properly now.

Upgrades Store Issue

This is one of the pain in the ass bugs which I have tried to look into before. There is a note on the Trello stating that I couldn’t reproduce the issue. This is from back in June when I last looked at it.

As you well know it is an awful lot harder to fix a bug if you cannot reproduce it.

Fortunately, I think I have managed to reproduce it this morning, which is nice. Lets hope this means I’m halfway towards fixing it!

Explaining the issue

The above picture is from the Upgrades store page. Each panel has an icon, an upgrade progress indicator, a line of text and a price with a coin icon.

For some reason, all of these seem to work perfectly except for the Self destruct one.

The line of text should only read Unlock when there are no yellow squares lit up. That is to say before the player purchases an upgrade for the first time.

Once the first upgrade has been purchased to unlock the item, the text should change to “upgrade” instead of “Unlock”, and the price should change.

However, as you can see in the image above, although its working ok for the Head start, it is not working as it’s intended for the self destruct powerup.

Neither the text nor the price has changed. The price is supposed to increase with each upgrade purchased.

To add to the confusion, once the Self destruct is fully upgraded, the price and the text do actually change. However, neither of the things it changes to are correct.

Oddly enough, filling in the yellow blocks seems to work correctly. My first stop was the UI script to see what happened when the button is pressed to buy an upgrade.

Fixing the issue

After a couple of hours of running the game, testing, reading code and repeating, I finally found the problem! (Although I did go for a 20 minute walk outside to get some air. I find it helps thinking and problem solving)

When I wrote this, I had actually copied and pasted the code handling each of the panels on this page. They are all virtually identical, with only a few minor differences.

Whilst doing this, I had apparently overlooked a variable. *sigh*

// Updates price if its not max level, otherwise clear price (and hide coin?)
SetUpgradeText(upgrades.selfDestructUpgrade, ui, 64, "SELF DESTRUCT")

Instead of selfDestructUpgrade, the function was being passed the data for the headStartUpgrade instead. Since none of these values were changing, neither were the text or price being displayed!

At least it was a simple fix once I had spotted the error. 🙂

Bullet X Speed issue

Lastly, I looked at the bullet x speed issue bug.

When the Anti-aircraft guns shoot, their bullets seem to drift left, which was noticeable when playing the game.

After checking the maths to make sure I had the angles and Sin/Cos correct, I started to experiment with alternative solutions.

The first idea was to alter the angle of travel. Since the sprite was drawn in the correct angle, there was no need to rotate it. All I had to do was change the bulletDirection constant.

This seemed to fix the problem, although it took a while to determine the best angle to resolve the issue. I also had to adjust the spawn point of the bullets a little.

All that was left to do was leave a note on the trello card and slide it over to the under review column.

In the next update

So that leaves us with just two bugs or known issues to fix. There is still the discrepancy as to how distance is measured between different types of challenges, and the occasional stutter which seems to have appeared.

Hopefully I will be able to get these fixed for the next update, then it will be a case of running through the Under review column and ensuring that all the bugs are fixed and working as expected.

Then it will be on to phase 2! Which is where I add some extra detail to the game mechanics to increase the longevity of the gameplay, as well as some extra zones and skins for the scratch cards (Possibly)

And that’s all for now

But, for now it is getting close to 3pm so I should wrap this up and get the social media posts prepped and ready for posting.

I will as always be back in two weeks with the next update. 🙂

Game Progress Update #66

Hello world! Welcome to the sixty sixth Dev with Dave game progress update.

What an absolute time of it I’ve had this last couple of weeks! Life seems determined to keep me away from the computer. I’ve even struggled to keep on top of my day job, let alone find some time to work on Flappy-vaders.

The absolute pinnacle of this was on Tuesday when I had to go for a SIX HOUR trip in the car to go and pick up one of the children, who had become stranded by the coast. The joys of parenthood. *sigh*

Still, I have managed to get some work done on the project.

What I had planned…

Carrying on from the last update, I had decided to do the following two tasks relating to the promotional video.

• Revise wording on the text card for the promo video
• Ensure first six seconds of gameplay has a powerup!

As well as some work on getting the last few known bugs/issues fixed. Although sadly, this didn’t happen.

Recording new footage

The first thing I decided to do was to try and get some new footage for the first six seconds of the video, only this time it had to include a pickup floating by.

So, I opened up OBS and AGK Studio, and after making the edits to ensure that the game starts off at the correct speed and in the right zone.

Once I’d obtained the footage I needed, It was time to switch to Hitfilm.

There then was a few minutes wasted as I updated the software to the latest version. If I haven’t said before, I absolutely always update to the lastest version of everything, as soon as an update is available. So even though I probably could have skipped this and saved a few minutes, I didn’t.

Then all that was left to do was to trim the footage so I had the six seconds I needed.

Editing the text

Next was changing the text on the cards which are displayed over the video.

I’m not happy with the one which reads “Collect untold wealth and treasures”, And since one of the larger issues I had with the first draft of the video was that it didn’t mention the pickups or upgrade, I think this card should be edited to reflect this.

After some deliberation, I decided on “Collect coins and buy upgrades”.

Creating the card was a simple case of opening Paint.net and creating the new card. I used the old card to ensure the text was in the correct position.

Finishing touches.

Once I had created the new assets and imported them into the project, swapping them for the old assets was a relatively straight forward process.

For the video, I just had to select an appropriate 6 seconds of footage, trim off the excess and delete the audio before slotting it into place on the timeline. Since I had simply overwritten the old text card with the new one, it had just loaded in with the rest of the project.

Lastly came exporting the video and uploading it to YouTube. Exporting only took a few seconds, as did uploading it.

Above is the v2 of the video. Let me know what you think 🙂

That’s all for now

Fingers crossed I will be back in another two weeks with the next progress update. Assuming that things go much more to plan than this week has.

Until next time 🙂

Game Progress Update #65

Hello World! And welcome to the sixty fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! This means that I have been writing this blog about Flappy-vaders for around two and a half years now. It’s gone from being just a sketch or two on a page, to being almost ready for release.

The last few weeks have again mostly been spent creating footage for the promotional video I am making. This has mostly been done inside on the desktop because neither my tablet nor laptop are as fast at processing video.

Let me tell you all about whats been going on.

Creating the video

Carrying on from where I left off in Progress Update 64, I had finished the Mega-zone. This was a specially created zone which contained all the elements of the game. I say finished, I mean that I thought it was ok, I am too much of a perfectionist to ever be 100% happy with my work. Anyway, I set about recording some footage..

Attempt one

I started off by warming my self up by flying the level without recording it. I flew majestically and did the zone perfectly, not once, but twice.

Next, I opened OBS Studio to record the footage, pressed record, and promptly forgot how to fly!

It took another two dozen attempts at least before I finally managed to record a successful run through the mega-zone.

I also recorded a few seconds of just the ship flying along an empty level as well.

It was when I was putting it together in HitFilm that I noticed a problem. In order to add text to the video, I needed to have the text under the scanlines overlay. This meant re-recording all the existing footage without the overlays *sigh*.

Attempt two

I hadn’t even opened any video software things started going wrong. First, I opened the notes relating to the work I had done so far. I noticed that only the last paragraph had been saved. So, instead of carrying on with the video, I had to try and remember what I had put down previously.

It turned out that removing the scanlines wasn’t a simple case of just commenting out a line or two. Because of the way Flappy-vaders handles user-input, the overlay is repositioned onscreen in several places in the code.

It also seems the Munro font doesn’t work inside HitFilm, so instead I am going to have to make all the text as images in paint.net and then add them to the video.

It took about an hour to determine the fontsize required, the spacing, and to create the first round of cards.

However the next day, I decided I didn’t like them and decided to change the wording.

I also spent some time sketching out time lines and calculating the speed needed for each section of the footage to be recorded, so the acceleration stays constant to match the music. I did this with pen and paper, which was a welcome change from the PC.

Also I decided it would be easier for this if I commented out the game over screen for now, so I can get the explosions recorded without UI over the top of them.

Attempt three

When I started recording the next lot of videos I discovered one lone solitary text left on screen. I could remove this in post production, but it would be better (re Easier) to remove it programmatically and re-record the footage.

It took quite a long time to find the cause of this text, and I think I may have missed a line off the One Note log while I was doing it. This will not doubt come and bite me in the arse at a later date.

However, once I have found the cause and fixed it, I was ready to record the next lot of video clips.

Unfortunately, after the first three or four videos, I apparently got mixed up with the footage recorded from the game. Since I hadn’t mentioned the speed in the file names or in , I couldn’t tell which ones were which. (Remember, each clip is progressively faster than the previous one).

When it came to the third clip onwards, I am remedied this by adding a debug read out to the display when the main menu is in place. This way it shows up in the bit I usually clip off and discard during editing.

Edits to the game code

I’ve made quite a few changes to the game code to make the video footage which I have been making. To make it easier to undo these changes, I have used two methods to remind me where changes have been made.

Firstly, I have been keeping a log of the changes in OneNote, but a word document or even notepad would do.

Secondly, each change also has a key word in the comment, so when I want to undo them all I can simply use the search facility to hunt them all down. I’m using the word PoopShtein, because I’m not likely to use it else where, and at heart I am still 14 years old! 😅

Finishing touches.

The last things I needed to do were to add the overlays for the CRT border and the scanlines.

I had to export a few times at different settings until I got the scanlines opacity coirrect. The first few clips were far too dark.

I also created a fifth card to display over the logo at the end of the video. This card displays a “Coming soon” message.

First Reactions

I did quickly post the work done so far for a few people to see. The feedback was mixed, some people loved it, others didn’t seem so keen. Still all feedback is gratefully received.

In the next revision, I am going to revisit the wording. I think it better to have just one line of text per card, even if it means reducing the length and having more cards.

I also noticed (after I’d uploaded it to YouTube), that all of the pickups have somehow ended up on the editing room floor, and not one made it to the finished video.

As well as including at least one pickup in the first six seconds, I would like the treasure card to be changed to something like “Collect coins and buy upgrades”

And that’s all for now.

That’s all I have time for this week. I will be back in a fortnight with the next progress report. Until then, I hope you all have a good couple of weeks.

See you soon.

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..

Game Progress Update #63

Hello World! And welcome to the 63rd Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It’s not the longest update I’m afraid this time round. I was hoping to get another couple of bugs fixed as well, but time got away from me.

The weather hasn’t helped. I am the exact opposite of solar powered, and the weather here in the UK has once again been amazing. Blue skies and sunshine however means a very lazy Dave.

Most of the work I did get done this time round was relating to the promotional video I am planning to make.

Promotional Video

The goal is to make a 30 second video to use to promote Flappy vaders on social media and on paid adverts. I’d already written a basic plan for it last update on paper.

I am just about happy with the plan for the video, but I am a little less happy that I have the skills to pull it off, but I will try, lol.

While I was planning the video, I did spend a while watching some more videos on how best to make game trailers and promotional videos in general.

I found >this< post to be quite an interesting read about transitions. Not only does it talk in depth about the types of transitions and where they work best, it also had a lot of example movie trailers which demonstrated exactly what the guy was talking about.

Promo video sound track

I started with the musical sound track. As I explained in the previous progress update, the first 6 seconds or so of the video will be quite extreme, full on game play. So the music will start off at around 1.5 times normal speed. Then after the initial 6 seconds have passed, then it slows down to its normal speed. And begins to slowly speed up as the next 18 seconds goes by until it reaches once again the speed it was initially.

I decided the easiest way to get the exact speeds and timings in the music was to code it specifically, so i added a few lines of code to the beginning of the game to do this and allow me to capture it using as video OBS Studio.

Promo video action sequences

Since it was such a success for the sound track I decided I was also going to use a similar method with the gameplay footage as well, rather than leaving up to luck and/or skill! lol.

I am going to disable the automatic acceleration of the game and instead set it manually in code before each recording session.

Also I am going to make an specific zone with all the elements I need in it for the first six seconds of the trailer. I will also be specifying the zones manually.

These game play sections will be recorded without the UI being seen. So I will need to hide those beforehand. I also do not need these videos to have music, only sound effects. So I will need to turn off the music volume in the settings before hand as well.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the special zones for the video finished in time. So I can’t show you any progress on this as yet. I am hoping that I will have at least a rough draft of it done for next time.

That’s all for now.

As always, I will be back in a fortnight with another update. In the mean time, don’t forget to follow Dev with Dave on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date with the project.

https://www.facebook.com/devwithdave

https://www.instagram.com/devwithdave

https://www.twitter.com/devwithdave

Game Progress Update #62

Hello World! Welcome to the sixty second Dev with Dave game progress update!

The glorious weather has continued. I’m currently sat outside in the garden with my laptop writing this blog post and enjoying the breeze.

This week has mostly been fixing bugs again (and finding new bugs, which was a little disheartening, but more on those later). But I did also manage to get some gameplay recorded hopefully to use for the promotional videos.

Anyway, let me tell you what I’ve got done.

Bug Fixes

In this update I have selected to get the following cards resolved🤞

• Player sometimes passes below floor
• Ship “flaps” when pausing/resuming
• Shield sprite doesn’t disappear at game over

Although the first one was started in the previous update because it took much longer to sort out than expected.

Player sometimes passes below floor

The first card I dealt with this time round was the Player sometimes passes below floor issue which I had previously started in the previous Progress Update.

While investigating the issue, I managed to find a new bug! Lol! The text for the self destruct unlock/upgrade does not change properly. As far as I can see all the other lines of text work properly. But I will test them all, just to be safe. I have added this as a new card on the Trello board.

Actually, I think I found three or four new bugs, but since they all related to the same issues relating to the second chance powerup, I didn’t give them new cards each. Instead I just noted them all in the existing card comments.

However, I did fix the passing through the floor issue. I found there was a conditional which was checking for sprite collisions and passing below a set floor position on the screen.

I duplicated the code and changed it so each conditional only checked for one thing.

I’m actually finding more bugs the more I work on this. It’s quite disheartening tbh 🙁

I noticed that the self destruct powerup was only working once per session. The most likely cause of this was a variable which was not being reset at the end of game (which it pretty much was, but more convuluted)

I tracked it down the the property which monitored the “phase” of the self destruct. It has three possible states, 0 = intialise, 1 = occurring, 2 = finished.

Infinite score bug

In an earlier attempt at solving this problem, I commented out a section which I thought was unused is it was where the phase value was reset to zero, but it turned out it wasn’t, resulting in this slightly chucklesome problem…

What was happening is that it would all run perfectly until the end, when due to some badly designed code, it would reset the phase value to 0, then increase it by 1 (d’oh!) resulting it in not initialising next time round.

Since it all more or less worked otherwise, I simply added a line to the game over section of code which this jumped to afterwards, to reset the phase variable to zero again.

I think this is all working now 🤞

Ship “flaps” when pausing/resuming

The next card on the list was the Ship “flaps” when pausing/resuming one.

The ship reacts to the press of the pause button in the same way as the rest of the screen presses. It propels the ship upwards slightly.

I fixed this issue by isolating the sprite ID of the pause button in game and then only activating a “jump” if the button is NOT pressed.

This was fairly straight forward to accomplish. I used the GetSpriteHitTest() command to see if the specific sprite was being hit at the specific coordinates, and it works as expected.

Shield sprite doesn’t disappear at game over

The Shield sprite doesn’t disapear at game over card was a simple one to fix. I found out where in the code the player sprite was hidden at the end of the game, and then added a line of code to hide the shield sprite as well.

If only every problem were this easy to solve.

Upgrade Store issue

This next card proved tricky to replicate. It was the one I discovered earlier with the self destruct text not updating properly. I checked the code and found nothing too obvious which would be causing only the self destruct powerup to behave like this.

Trailer/Promotional video

I also managed to make a start on a plan for the promotional video. Due to time constraints I am just making one 30 second video which will be used for all intial promo/advertising.

I will be using the graph below taken from Game Makers Toolkit, to create the video.

The plan is to have a few seconds of exciting full speed game play at first, before slowing right down and gently introducing key aspects of the game play. As each feature is introduced, the music and temp of the game begin climbing back up to a similar level as the Cold open section.

The climax section will finish by revealing the name of the game and a call to action.

Thats all for now

And that is all I have time for now. I’m going to be back in a fortnight as always. Where I may hopefully have even got all the known issue cards done and dusted, who knows, lol.

Anyway, remember to follow Dev with Dave on social media!

See you next time 🙂