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 🙂

Game Progress Update #95

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

Well, it’s well and truly winter. At least twice since the last update, I’ve woken up to freshly fallen snow outside. Not quite enough to make everything white, but certainly enough to be noticeable.

It’s been very cold though. Even though I have had the heating on for a great deal of the time, there is a chill in the air.

It’s also been quite a busy time as thoughts turn to getting things ready for Christmas, and I have been quite busy with other projects which need seasonal preparation. This has limited the time I have had to work on Flappy-vaders this time round.

The thing I have spent most my time on this time round, is getting social media assets ready to share on Flappy-vaders social media.

Let me tell you what I have been doing this last fortnight.

Bugs in the game

The more I play test the game, the longer the list of bugs grows on the Trello board. I know I mentioned this in the last progress update, but I have had little chance to work on fixing bugs.

The most concerning bug currently is the one which exists in the In app purchasing of the coin packs. I would much rather get this one fixed before release. I believe it’s an issue with App Game Kit Studio however. I’ve reported it on the Git Hub page, and am now just waiting for them to fix it.

The other bugs in the list shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to resolve. However, having an entire afternoon free to sit at the PC and fix bugs in the game is another thing, lol.

Social media assets

It occurred to me while I was writing up the emails for the email sequence, that I was going to need assets to share on the Flappy-vaders social media pages.

Remember, that I am going to be promoting this game through organic social media as well as paid adverts. Both of these will require video and image assets.

So I set about deciding on what kind of assets I could or should be using.

One of my ideas was a sequence of images and videos which would demonstrate various aspects of the game. things like game play, the pickups, boosts, etc.

I started with the pickups. My initial idea was to create a 10 second video which just had some text over the scrolling landscape backdrop. With the icon bouncing onto the screen, remaining for a few seconds before shrinking back down to nothing.

However, after creating it, I decided this was too long and boring. I decided to shorten this to maybe 3 or 4 seconds, and have some footage of the game with the player grabbing the pickup and demonstrating it’s use.

This meant creating specific zones which had the correct timing and elements to do exactly what I needed in the limited time allotted. These clips could only be 6 to 7 seconds long. The text would remain onscreen as well, so the game play really needs to be focused on the middle 3rd of the screen.

Sadly, this is quite a job as to save time, I never made a zone editor for the game. Instead I need to position all the elements manually by entering the coordinates directly into the zone data. *sigh*.

Lost files

One of my biggest issues when I am developing a game is losing the original files for things. Whether that’s the ttf file for the font, or the project file for a composite image which I need to edit but can only find bitmaps of.

Despite my best efforts, it seems to have happened again. I cannot find the original music file :/ I have the edited version in the games media file, where I have separated the intro from the loop, and converted them to Ogg Vorbis so I can programmatically adjust the speed.

However, Hitfilm, the software I use for post production video editing cannot load in Ogg Vorbis files.

I’m hoping that I have written down the details of the original file in my original notes. Otherwise I will have to re-join the ogg vorbis parts and convert it to mp3 again.

That’s all for now.

That’s all I have time for today. I will be back in two weeks with another update. Which, if I’m being honest will probably be just making more assets to share on Social medias.

Catch you all next time

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.

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

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.

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 🙂

Game Progress Update #92

Hello world, and welcome to the ninety second Dev with Dave Game Progress update!

This last couple of weeks seems to have whooshed by so fast. It only feels like a few days ago I was busy writing the last update.

I don’t suppose it’s helped that we have had nothing but torrential rain for the last few days, which has spoilt any plans I had for going out and doing things, as well as making the days dark and dreary.

Anyway, lets look over what I have managed to do this update.

Marketing Stuff

As with the last progress update, (which you can read >here<) Pretty much all of what I have done the last two weeks on this project has been to do with marketing and making sure the marketing stuff is ready to go once we have a concrete release date.

I’ve not done much to the actual marketing strategy document (or blog post, I’m undecided currently), focussing instead on the email sequences aspect this time round.

Email sequences

Probably the biggest aspect of the marketing push for Flappy-vaders, other than paid for adverts, is the email list.

The Flappy-vaders website will collect the email addresses of those interested in the game, which will in turn trigger an email sequence to welcome folks and tell them a little more about the game.

I had previously written out a few emails which make up two sequences. The first sequence is triggered when the user signs up. The second will trigger a week or two before the actual launch day.

I decided that the best thing I could do was to create the emails in Brevo (The email sending solution I decided to use as I use it in all the websites I make for transactional emails).

First I had to configure a few things in Brevo before I could do this. I was unable to access the Host control panel, so I still need to setup the DKIM record to help prevent the mails from going to peoples spam/junk folder.

Creating the emails in Brevo was quite simple. They have drag and drop tools which allow you to configure the emails as you see fit with little effort.

It was during this bit that the self-doubt crept in. The more I looked at what I had written, the less confident I was that it would work. It started with a subject line which I thought could be better. But the more and more I read the copy, the less I felt like it was good enough.

I initially opened Chat GPT to bounce some ideas around with regarding the subject lines, but the more I delved into it the more I worried about the content of the emails.

Then I figured I’d try a more analogue approach. So I printed out what I had so far, and had planned on sitting outside under the gazebo as I worked on the emails. The rain ruined this idea, so instead I went and sat on the sofa inside.

Other marketing ideas.

One thing which did distract me for a good hour the other day was the idea of getting celebrities to record promotional videos for me.

I was scrolling on my phone, and saw an advert with Anthony Starr (the actor Homelander from the Boys) for some game or other. (I’m pretty sure it was the real Anthony Starr, and not a deep-fake.). This got me wondering, and a quick Google led me to Cameo.com and possibly wasting an hour of time I could have better used.

It turns out, I could get a celebrity like Paul Chuckle, or another from a wide range of talent, to record a short promotional video for Flappy-vaders for only a few hundred pounds.

That’s all for now.

And that’s all I have time for now. It’s already twenty past ten. I’m supposed to be playing Fortnite with my buddy at ten, and I still need to finish preparing this post, and then do the social media.

Oh well, hopefully it’ll not take too long.

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

Game Progress Update #91

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

I honestly never expected that this project would have taken this long to do. As I’m sure I have said a few times already, a few rather large problems have presented themselves along the way.

I’ve got to admit also that I’m not particularly enjoying the marketing side of this project, and I will be glad when it’s over. I am first and foremost a coder, and I am happiest when I am sat at the PC coding away.

Still, we are in the final stretch, so hopefully it will all fall into place soon.

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

Marketing strategy

As I mentioned in the last update >here<, I am still planning on publishing the marketing strategy, but it is taking me a lot longer to finish than I thought it would.

I have been mostly checking all the elements of the strategy are ready to go, and I have noticed a few things which still need doing.

I have not yet configured the email sequences to start. Although I have written the copy for the emails, I have not yet added any visual assets to them.

I also need to create a lot more assets for the adverts and social media posts. (Which I actually had planned to do this week, but circumstances were against me)

Website changes

I reviewed the Flappy-vaders website. This involved tweaking the colours, and also editing the text copy a little.

I reversed the black/grey colour scheme of the background. As I felt that the previous grey gradient didn’t look quite right. Especially with the black bar across the middle for trhe

The website is a simple landing page made with WordPress, demonstrating my Jack-of-all-trades abilities with computers.

I am using Nelio Software’s testing plugin to run A/B tests on the website once the advertising goes live. This will allow me to determine if changes made are effective or not.

If you want to check out any changes made, the flappy-vaders website is >here<

Asset Creation

I was hoping to take some new photos and videos of the game, and people playing it, using a DSLR camera instead of a phone camera.

But, as is always the way, the camera had been left on and the battery was completely flat by the time I went to use it. I charged it up, but I didn’t have time to do anything much with it before I had to write this blog.

I’ve never shot video with the Canon, so I would like to compare the quality of the footage it takes with the footage my phone records.

And thats’s all for now

That’s all I have managed to do this time round. The down side to this marketing stuff is it’s mostly planning and not the easiest thing to write a blog post about.

I will be back as always next week with another update.

In the mean time, I will try and think of a way to make it a little more exciting 😉 lol