Game Progress Update #46

Hello world and welcome to the forty sixth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update

You might have guessed from the lateness of this blog, and general quietness on social media that I’ve not had a great deal of time again this fortnight to work on the game.

This has not been helped by my laptop deciding it was going to install the latest Windows 11 patch today (Which it has done 20% of over the last THREE HOURS!!)

I have managed however to get some work done, so let me tell you about it now

Graphics

The first thing I did this week was to set about optimizing the graphics.

A couple of people who have been testing the game had commented about the graphical asset used in the explosion not matching the resolution of the rest of the game (which was true), so I changed this out for one which followed the design scheme better.

I still think there is room for improvement here. The new sprite feels a little large, and I’m not sure the particle emission settings are quite right.

The only other graphical asset which was left over from the original prototype was the Zone start marker. I have removed this from the couple of zones which still had it.

Play Testing

During my many (many) hours AFK this week, I have at least managed to rack up a few hours of play testing Flappy-vaders on my phone.

I’m happy to announce that I have yet to find any new bugs! I’ll try and get some new ones added to the next build! 🤪 lol

About Page

I can’t remember if I’ve said or not before, but I have an amazing idea for the about page. It’s really retro and works quite well with the graphical scheme I’m using for the game. I’m not going to say too much about it.

I was hoping to have had more time to finish this bit, but unfortunately that’s not been the case.

I have managed to create a blank page in the UI to display the about information on and have included the standalone script I created for the about page in a separate project.

I think all I have to do now is create a check to see if the specific UI page is being displayed where I can call the UpdateAboutPage() function; I also need to create the text for the about page and set the properties of the text.

That’s all for now

I’m afraid that’s all for this update. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the next update.

Game Progress Update #45

Hello world, and welcome to the forty fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

Things have been a lot more normal this week it feels. There has been no drama, no apocalyptic weather, and I feel like I’ve actually had a reasonable amount of time to work on Flappy-vaders.

I even managed to get a few quotes for repairing the tablet! So fingers crossed 🤞 I’ll be able to get that fixed soon. As much as it’s higher spec, my laptop is a lot heavier and less fun to carry around.

Adverts

I made a start getting the adverts working in Flappy-vaders.

I had already created an AdMob app and a couple of Ad Units, an interstitial advert and a rewarded video advert.

I created a script to contain all the variables and functions related to adverts, and started fleshing it out.

I didn’t bother as yet with asking for GDPR permissions as I’m only using test adverts for now, but I will be adding this at some point in the future. Nor has any consideration been given to IAP advert removal, but this should be a fairly straight forward thing to implement later.

I did however create a function to show an interstitial advert, which is now called when the player has finished reading the Game over screen.

I also created a function to show a rewarded advert, as well as code to check if the video was watched in its entirety or not. If the player successfully watches to the end, they are rewarded with some coins.

The eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed that the button says 100 coins, but the video only rewards 10. This is another thing that will be corrected once I work more on the in game currency and its value.

Bug fixes

The video I shared in Progress Update #44 showed that the code I had written to check each daily mission was different when generating new daily missions was flawed and not working properly.

A closer inspection of the code revealed that the code was only checking missions 1 and 2 and 2 and 3. This of course allowed missions 1 and 3 to be the same.

I fixed this by adding a third check to ensure that 1 and 3 were different as well.

I noticed also that I had added Adverts to the GDD (And also the Trello) twice, once in 4 UI and once again in 7 Monetization. I thought monetization was the best place, as I have little to no direct control over presentation or interactions of the adverts. I’ve updated the Trello and GDD.

Daily Prizes

The last thing I’ve been working on is the Daily Prize scratch cards. Or at least experimenting with their appearance in Paint.net. I find drawing over the actual game elements to help speed up the design process.

I may add a title to the card with an appropriate graphic, but this would mean adding a scroll to the page as the scratch card would be too tall to fit with a title.

Once the card is scratched (all six panels removed), then the game transitions to another screen where the player can either collect the reward or double it by watching a rewarded video.

That’s all for now

And that’s all that I’ve had time for this time round. I’ll be back in two weeks with another update, and hopefully another sizeable chunk of the game done 🙂

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Dev with Dave on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Game Progress Update #44

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

I’m really sorry about the last update being cancelled. It really has been a roller coaster of a time here and that has obviously affected how much time I have to spend on this project.

As a result not only has the Dev with Dave social media been awfully quiet the last few weeks, but I’ve once again not had much time to spend on writing the game.

Worst of all, I got more than a little side tracked at the beginning of the week when it came to recording the video above.

The Dark Mode Conundrum

Now, those of you who read the last update will know that I upgraded my PC with a new SSD and RAM, but I had to install a clean version of Windows as backing up and restoring was proving to be an issue.

Because of this, I had to reinstall Hitfilm Express, which is the free video editing software I use for doing post production with on the clips from flappy-vaders you see here.

Unfortunately (for me at least) the new version no longer has the option to switch between dark and light UI modes. I find dark mode to be really difficult to read, so I immediately fell down the google hole trying to find out how to change Hitfilm to Light mode.

Looking back, I can’t believe how much time I wasted trying to sort this problem out.

A few new bugs

Just watching the video above I managed to find at least two new bugs 😲

Firstly, the system I wrote to make sure that none of the daily missions is of the same type as the other two doesn’t seem to work. This is unfortunate, but I think it’s because I only compare Mission 1 with mission two, and mission two with mission 3.

Secondly that there is definitely something screwy going on with the targeting lasers on the missiles. As well as there being a transparency issue but the lasers sometimes seem to appear where they aren’t supposed to be. They are possibly legacy positions from previous uses of the laser sprite which haven’t been reset properly.

I’ve made a note of both these things on the Trello board, which is public so you can check it out for yourself. And will try and get the changes made to the bug board on the Dev with Dave website tomorrow.

That’s all for now

That’s all for this update I’m afraid. I’ll (try and) be back next fortnight with another update.

See you then 🙂

Game Progress Update #43

Hello world! And welcome to the forty third Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

This updates disaster (as it seems I have a new one every time I write this blog) involved Kirk, my PC which took much longer to upgrade than I thought it would. This did eat quite drastically into the time I had free for writing Flappy-vaders.

Regardless of this I have got a fair chunk of coding done for the game. Carrying on from update 42, I have been mostly working on the daily missions.

Keep reading to find out more 🙂

PC Upgrades

I decided to spend my weekend off the other week upgrading my main PC. I had purchased a new SSD, 8Gb of extra ram from Crucial, and a fancy back lit gaming keyboard.

Fitting the parts wasn’t too challenging. The Ram and keyboard were a breeze to fit, but the SSD data and Power wires were a bit of a squeeze as my case around 15 years old and wasn’t designed with such a huge graphics card as the one I have, in mind.

The problems started when I tried to clone my existing copy of windows onto the new drive. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get the PC to boot from the cloned copy of Windows.

Now bearing in mind this is the computer I use for work most days, so I can’t really afford to have it out of action for long. But It didn’t take long before I had used all the time allocated for the job with no success at all. 😞

In the end however (after wasting another couple of days) I decided to just give the PC a fresh install of Windows, even if it did mean having to waste even more time reinstalling all the apps as well.

Daily Missions

The first thing I did when I managed to get AGK Studio open on the laptop, was add code to add a little bit of polish to the daily missions pages in the UI.

This involved greying out missions when they were completed, and hiding the coin icon when the mission is set to done.

When I tested the new additions, I noticed that the daily missions done and progress values weren’t being reset when the missions refreshed.

This was fixed by adding a couple of lines of code to reset the two variables in the RefreshDailyMissions() function.

The last thing I did towards the daily missions was adding functionality to some more of the daily mission types.

The “Play n games” mission was done by adding a line of code to increase the progress . Everything else was handled by code written previously.

I also added functionality to the “Collect n coins” mission. Again all this needed was a simple line of code. This time in the function which checked player collisions, when colliding with a coin.

Uploaded new test build!

The last thing I have to say is that I have uploaded the third test build of Flappy-vaders to Google Play for testing.

I’m preparing to send out the initial email to the testers with the link so they can enroll in the test and download the latest version of the game. So if you have told me you want to be a tester then keep an eye on your inboxes.

And thats all for now

I’ll be back as always in two weeks with another update. Hopefully it will involve lots of improvements to the game, and slightly fewer general life disasters for me, lol.

Thank you as always for following the project.

Until next time

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #42

Hello world! And welcome to the forty second Dev with Dave game progress update!

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the update who’s number is the same as the answer to life, the universe and everything, falls (almost) on the same day as my birthday!

In this update, I’ve mostly been working on the Daily Missions, which has not only been a much bigger task than I anticiptated, but has also been a huge pile of fun to write.

The laptop

As I said last update, I’m using my laptop for the foreseeable future after I accidentally dropped the tablet and smashed the corner of the screen. I will take it to the shop to find out how much the repair will be soon, but until then I’m using the laptop.

It’s not the greatest piece of kit in the world, but is a significant step up from the Atom powered tablet which I had been using. I couldn’t remember the exact model and spec last time, so here they are for anyone who is interested.

It’s an HP 15-bs158sa, with an Intel i5-8250U cpu, a 1Tb HDD and 8Gb of ram.

No duplicate missions!

The first thing I did was fix a bug which occasionally caused duplicate daily missions. This was a simple enough fix. I simply added a check to see if any of the Mission Types were the same, and if they were then to regenerate the list of missions.

It’s possibly not the most elegant solution, but it works 🙂

Daily Mission Functionality

The daily missions are a lot closer to being finished than they were before. I still have quite a way to go, but I’m definitely making progress.

When the game generates a new list of daily missions, it now also provides them with preliminary values for the target and the reward. Ultimately these will be generated using a formula based on the number of times the player has completed the mission type before, but until then, it is just using single fixed values.

I have also added a function which updates the daily missions progress value, and created a function which checks to see if the daily missions progress is greater or equal to the missions target value.

Completing Missions

Originally I simply had the game freeze with a message on screen, when it had detected a daily mission had been completed. This was fine for development, but wouldn’t be well received by actual players no doubt. lol.

The first thing was to decide what information needed to be put on the revised game over screen.

I decided that the player needed to know their score and coin count, so they were copied and pasted from the game ui screen.

Next was the daily missions themselves, which was decided to be a text description and a reward value (with a coin icon)

Lastly was resizing and repositioning the existing Game Over and Tap to continue texts.

After several hours of planning and sketching, then editing code etc. The final result looks like this.

I added the code to update the daily missions listed on the game over screen to the function I had already created which set the text on the missions page of the ui.

A whole load of new rough edges

A lot of the daily missions stuff I’ve written about above only works for two of the five daily mission types at best.

The last time I played it I noticed that the missions weren’t always being completed when the progress reached or passed the target value.

Sadly I have run out of time for this update, but I will be back at it soon and hope to have Daily Missions done and dusted for the next update.

That’s all for now

That’s all the time I have for now. I’m actually super impressed that for the first time in absolutely months I have got this update finished and shared on time! lol

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the blog. I’ll be back in a fortnight with more news about the game, including how well the first round of testing is going.

If you want to be involved in the testing, it’s not too late, just drop me a message or email.

Until next time

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #41

Hello world, Welcome to the forty first Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

Summer time is well and truly upon us this week. My phone is saying it’s currently 30° outside, and the car agrees. It is definitely a very hot day today.

I’m currently sitting at my desk in front of the fan as I write this and I’m still an unpleasant sweaty mess.

I got a good few hours of work done on the game this time around. Mostly more Daily Missions stuff.

Daily Missions

All the work I’d done on the Daily Missions in the last Game Progress Update had introduced a couple of new bugs. I worked on these things first

Daily Mission Selection

I’d made a rather simple error with this. There are 5 mission types currently, which range from 0 to 4. When I’d coded the bit which selected new missions at random, I’d simply set the maxMissionTypeCount constant to 5, the number of actual mission types currently. However when I used this in the Random() function it ended up returning values ranging from 0 to 5! This is the cause of the occasional blank daily mission.

I fixed it by simply changing the value to 4 and making a note in a comment above the constant.

Daily Mission Reset

Another problem with the code turned out to be with the way the new reset time was calculated. I found that if you ran the game after the reset time that day, every time you clicked the game icon you would get a new set of daily missions.

This was one of those problems which I had to sit down and think about with a pen and paper. I worked out that the problem was that the game was choosing the new reset time to be 8pm on the same day. Meaning that when you started the game after 8pm, the game would decide the timer was over and refresh the mission list.

To fix this issue, after the existing code. I added a check to see if the hours component of the time was 20 or greater, and if it was then to add 24 hours to the reset timer. I’ve tested this and it appears to work.

Targets and Rewards

The other thing I’ve gotten done with the Daily Missions is decide on a way to determine the target values and reward amount for the missions.

I decided to expand on the missionTotals[] array data, by changing it from an integer array to a typed array and adding variables to store the minimumTarget and the maximumTarget, as well as the step value. As well as the minimumReward and maximumReward also.

The system record the number of times a mission type is successfully completed. This value is used with the step value to determine how far between the minimum and maximum values the target value and the reward is.

These values don’t change and will be stored in the array but not saved to the missions save file.

The Alpha test

I also have officially launched the alpha test. This is an exact snapshot of the current build of Flappy-vaders so some of it doesn’t work and some of it doesn’t work very well.

Those who have provided me with an email address will be receiving an email with instructions on how to download and play the game.

Don’t worry if you haven’t, there is still time! Just let me know either by email or social media, what google mail address is associated with your android and I’ll add you to the list of testers.

I’m actually excited to get some new perspectives on the game.

That’s all folks

And that is all I have to share this time round. I’ll as always be back in two weeks with another update for you.

Game Progress Update #40

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

It’s been a fairly strange time the last couple of weeks. Two of my children celebrated their birthdays, and the whole country is celebrating the Queen’s platinum jubilee with two extra bank holidays yesterday and today.

Despite this I feel like I have had hours to work on the game, which I have thrown myself into. So much so that I completely forgot to post any social media on Dev with Dave the last week. (Oops – will do better next week I promise)

Anyway, I’ve mostly been working on the daily missions this update, and have made loads of progress which I will tell you about shortly.

but first, a slight change in the hardware I’m using.

A slight change

Although the tablet still works, I’ve been hesitant to use it with the cracked screen. I’ll try and get it fixed as soon as I can. In the mean time I’m using my laptop instead.

It’s a few years old, and isn’t the most powerful. I’ll find a list of the actual spec of it for the next update.

Daily Missions

The first thing I did was to create the array to store the number of times the player has completed each mission type. I will use this value to determine the difficulty of the next mission by increasing the target value in relation to the number of times the player has previously completed a mission of that type.

This array was also added to the daily mission save data, as well as new values to record the players progress with each mission, as well as whether or not the challenge had been completed.

Next I tweaked the layout of the Daily Missions panels in the UI. This involved repurposing the second line of text to contain the reward, realigning it to the right, and adding the coin icon.

While I was making changes to the UI I also added a countdown to the divider at the top of the daily missions page. Fortunately AGK has commands to return the hours, minutes and seconds from UNIX time so it was quite simple to implement.

The next thing I did was create a function which could update the text on the daily mission page of the UI. Ultimately this function will also change the daily mission icon as well, but for now it’s just the text and a grey square.

New Bugs Introduced

As with any bit of prolonged coding, I have of course introduced a couple of new bugs.

Firstly, the bit where it counts down the daily mission timer works perfectly, however it does not reset the time properly. This results in the missions resetting every time you play the game instead of daily.

Secondly I think I have miss understood how the Random command works in AGK as instead of returning a 0 to 4 when choosing a new random mission type, it’s returning a 0 to 5. Which means occasionally that there is a blank mission on the daily mission page.

Both these bugs have been added to the Trello and the bugs page here on the website.

That’s all for now

And that is about all I have managed for this update.

I’ll be back as always in two weeks (give or take the odd day) when I hope to have the Daily missions working properly. I also hope to get the test build updated.

Anyway, until next time

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #39

Hello world! And welcome to the thirty ninth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

By my reckoning this update marks around 18 months of working on this project, and looking back at how far it has come makes me feel quite proud 🙂

This update I have mostly been working on the Daily Missions again.

But first, I have to start this update with a spot of bad news..

Disaster strikes

Yesterday I was sitting out in the garden under the gazebo, enjoying the evenings coolness and working on Flappy-vaders with the tablet perched on my lap.

Suddenly and for no particular obvious reason, the tablet slipped off and fell onto the concrete floor 😭

It still works fortunately (for the time being), so I am able to carry on with the project. I’m hoping I can get it fixed at some point though.

Daily Missions

I have spent most of the time this week carrying on from the last update and the work on the Daily Missions.

The missions themselves were broken down into a mission type, a mission target, and a variable to allow alternate texts.

The first thing I did was create a couple of types, and a variable to contain the types. These were to hold data relating to the three missions as well as the reset time.

I decided to use unix time to track the reset time of the daily challenges, as it is simpler to work in seconds than to convert a regular date and time.

Once I’d created the variable responsible for tracking the three daily missions, it was time to flesh out the functions which would Load and Save the mission data.

I also created a function which generates three new missions, by choosing a mission type and target value at random.

Lastly I created a function which returns true if the reset time has passed, or false if not.

I still need to make some improvements as I’m not happy with the way that the reset time works. I’d rather it be a fixed time every day, where as currently it’s 24 hours after the missions reset.

I also need to create an array which will store how many missions of each type you have done before. This will be used to determine the target value for new missions. This array will also need to be added to a save file somewhere as well.

I’ll try and get these working if not completely finished in time for the next update.

Bug list

I’ve also managed to get the bugs from the Trello board added to the bug board on the website.

Doing this has shown that I still have a few things to set up with the bug reporting, lol.

I’m just waiting for a couple of email addresses from people who have said they wanted to join in the testing before I launch the testing. (So if you want to join in there is still time..)

Reporting seems quite straightforward though.

To help prevent spam and abuse of the bug reporting, there is a captcha style test required, and all bugs are moderated before being made visible.

That’s all folks

And that’s all for this progress update! I’ll be back as always in two weeks time with hopefully more news about the progress of the game!

Until next time!