Game Progress Update #81

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

It hardly seems five minutes since I was writing the last one of these. I guess it’s true what they say about time flying when your having fun. 🙂

Carrying on from the last update, this update feels

That’s not to say there haven’t been the usual distractions. I had a dentist appointment this week, and a tooth taken out.😞 This left me feeling a bit meh (And a lot like I’d had a stroke) for the rest of the day and I just vegged in front of the TV instead of working on the game as I had planned.

The next day I also took a day away from the PC to watch Amazon’s amazing new Fallout TV show. I am a huge fan of dystopia in general, but Fallout has a special place in my heart. The Show is very true to the look and feel of the game. If you haven’t already watched it, you should!

Anyway, let me tell you about what I have managed to get done this time round.

Social Media Leveraging

I think I’m currently on week 3 of the small scale social media leveraging plan for promoting Flappy-vaders organically on social media.

So far I have just been interacting with other peoples posts. Things like liking and commenting on posts. The first of my posts are planned for next week.

Email list capturing

With thoughts turning towards starting to getting prospective players emails onto the list. It was time I had a refresher on using Facebook ads to direct people to the website. I downloaded a copy of the Meta traffic playbook. This is a step-by-step guide for when you create a new traffic campaign in Ads Manager

It’s more than likely I will probably use the same promotional video that I have used previously for these ads, as well as a few carefully chosen words of copy.

I have also given some thought to the email sequence which will be run once a user signs up.

Once a user signs up, a welcome aboard email is sent out. This will provide a brief rundown over what will happen over the next few months. Also mention free coin pack.

Once I have a content plan in place for the Flappy-vaders Facebook page, I will send out another email asking people to follow us on Facebook.

It’s been a while since I created an HTML email, but I am hoping that emails sent by this sequence will have the same appearence and style as the Flappy-vaders website.

I still need to decide which provider I will use for sending out the email sequences.

Security Blog

I’ve not forgotten about the blog I promised a while back about keeping your audience safe. I am trying to get it finished, but every time I think I have a few minutes to work on it, something unexpected pops up.

I just wanted to reassure anyone who might be waiting for it! Thank you for your patience.

As soon as it’s finished I will share a link to it on social media.

In App Purchase Bug

I also had a quick look at the in app purchase code. If you remember, I noticed a pretty serious bug with the purchasing of coin packs the other week.

I was hoping it was something obvious, but sadly I couldn’t see anything.

I have a few ideas however as to how to approach this, and I will be uploading some new test builds over the next few weeks to try and address this.

That’s all for now.

It’s officially late. In an ideal world, I get the Progress update finished and shared on social media by 4:30pm on Friday afternoon. It’s currently 10pm on Friday Evening, and I still have to finish the blog, let alone write the social media posts for it.

I was hoping to be playing with Fortnite on the PlayStation with my buddy by this time. Oh well, lol.

I will be back as always in two weeks with the next thrilling instalment of the Flappy-vaders Game Progress Update!

See you all then 🙂

Game Progress Update #80

Hello world! Welcome to the eightieth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

After I finished all the outstanding tasks on the Trello last update, this update is mostly about promotion. This has made a nice change tbh. As much as I enjoy coding, it’s nice to take a break from it every once and a while*

I even managed to get out for lunch, where I enjoyed a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, large fries and a cup of tea courtesy of the local McDonalds.

Anyway, let me tell you what I have been up to this update.

*I should point out that I still code almost every day. I meant in my spare time, lol.

New bugs found

So straight out the starting gates today, I found two new bugs. Not an ideal start. But I guess I’m happy I found them rather than them making it to production.

Menu notification bug

The first one was obvious as soon as I started the game. Where I had completed the first daily mission the last time I had played the game, I had not looked at the menu page. As a result, it was still showing the red exclamation notification even though the daily missions had been refreshed.

Coin Pack purchasing bug

The second, and rather more important bug relates to purchasing the coin packs. Google recently changed the way consumable purchases work. I think the bug is caused by either me coding it badly, or misunderstanding how the new procedures work.

When you purchase a coin pack once, everything works fine. When you purchase it a second time, it tells you that you already own the product. However, the third time you purchase the coin pack, it works fine again.

Since this bug relates to IAP I am rating this one as top priority to get fixed.

Website

Since I am soon going to be directing people to the website (https://flappy-vaders.co.uk if you’ve not already seen it), I decided to give it a quick once over and make sure it was as good as I could get it.

I’ve received positive feedback overall on the site design and layout, but there were a couple of things I couldn’t decide upon, so I am using A/B testing to determine which option works best.

There are two things I am testing for. The first is whether the first line of text appears above or below the video. On a desktop this brings the game blurb above the crease, so that the user doesn’t have to scroll to read it.

The second is the header text on the email collection form.

I will use the data from these tests to optimise the website, once I have determined which variants work better.

Social Media Accounts

I created a Facebook page for the Game today. I may tweak the graphics used a little, but I am fairly happy with how it looks so far.

It was an added bonus that the game blurb which I copied from the website is exactly the right length for the page blurb also.

Unfortunately I need 25 followers before I can get a custom URL for the page. Hopefully I will get this soon, but for now you can view the page >here<. (Feel free to like it 🙏 lol).

Social Media Leveraging

I have started on my Social media group leveraging plan also.

The first few weeks of the 12 week plan are simply interacting with other peoples posts for now. Liking and commenting and just getting to know the feel of the groups.

I have a list of the groups I selected, and have been checking each one every few days, and going over the posts since my last visit.

Whenever I find a post which appeals to me, I like it or drop a comment. The goal of this is to build a sense of familiarity with the group users, so interacting with users and their posts is important.

I am not likely to mention anything directly about Flappy-vaders for a while yet. I may make references in passing, but there won’t be any promoting of the game just yet.

Paid promotion

This is what a lot of my AFK time has been spent planning.

My current thinking is that I am going to initially split the advertising efforts two ways. Firstly, I am going to advertise the Website itself, and getting interested people to leave their email address. Secondly, I am going to promote the Facebook page, which in turn will also guide people towards the website/email list.

Both email list and Facebook group will announce the release of the game. Simultaneously, a Google Universal App Campaign will start promoting the game as well.

Since I have a much smaller budget for this than I planned on, I’m going to have a chat with a couple of more knowledgeable people before setting anything in stone.

That’s all for now

That’s the end of this update. I will be back in another two weeks with the next one. In which I will hopefully have set up an email sequence to welcome people to the email list, as well as hopefully some results from our A/B testing.

See you all next time 🙂

Game Progress Update #79

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

Being British, my natural instinct is to talk about the weather. This is because we have such an incredible amount of it here in the UK.

Only this morning, it was only just above freezing when I woke up. So I wore my coat when I went to town to run errands. However, by the time I left the house, it was actually a lot warmer outside, with blue skies and sunshine. I was regretting taking my coat, right up to the bit where the heavens opened and a slightly early April shower drenched me.

Other than the weather keeping me on my toes, I’ve been busy fixing the last few remaining bugs. I’ve also been busy with the marketing plan, which I would like to have got finished by now, but sadly I haven’t.

Anyway, let’s look at what I have managed to get done this week.

Tasks remaining

On Monday I moved all the cards from the known bugs and issues list, to the In Progress list of the Trello. I also took ownership of them. These are the six remaining cards.

• Scratch card prizes
• Issue with collect prize daily mission
• Match 3 texts on scratchers
• Tap to try again
• AA Turret fire sound
• Intro problem

As they are all bug fixes rather than bits which need new systems creating. So I am hoping that I can get all of them finished in time.

Bug fixing

The big task of the week was to get the last few bugs fixed, leaving us (hopefully) a completed game!

Match 3 text on scratchers.

This was the first card I chose off the list. It was a simple case of editing the four scratch card images to change the text. I had put match 3 on all of them, but you can get a prize from only matching two.

I had the project files for the images, so it was a straight forward task to edit out the text, and replace it with the correct value.

The biggest issue was that I couldn’t remember which font I had used, only that the name started with an ‘m’. I do have it written down in the documentation, but I didn’t need to look it up in the end.

Tap to try again text.

I noticed that the “Tap to try again” text didn’t really mesh with the way the other controls worked, so I have decided to change it to a button instead.

After my first attempt, the button placement was ok, but needs to be higher up. I also noticed that the text colour needs changing from white to black, but that is handled by a different function.

The second attempt sees the position perfect, and the text is now black.

For simplicities sake, even though there is now a button, I am leaving the code in place which just checks for a screen tap once the speed has decreased sufficiently.

Issue with Collect prize daily mission

This issue relates to the text on the Daily Missions screen. When it is the Collect Daily prize mission, the text remains the same, where as the number of daily prizes to collect increases each time.

This was a fairly straight forward issue to fix, I added a conditional to the line where it created the mission text. If there is more than 1 prizes to collect, it now uses the target value in the text string.

I could not verify this card worked though. So it is still in the list, but I believe it’s working.

AA Turret fire sound

During playtesting, it felt like the the sound of the aa cannons didn’t follow the fading of the other zone elements as the scrolled off screen.

I fixed this by adding some code to reduce the volume of the effect once the cannon has scrolled off the screen.

Scratchcard prizes

The card suggested that winning two strawberries didn’t award the player the prize. Instead the player got 10 coins and a “sorry, you did not win” message.

I could not replicate this issue. I played over 40 scratch cards in flappy-vaders, and ended up only getting 3 strawberry wins. Two maximum prizes of 950 coins, and a 2 strawberry win of 95 coins.

About scroller issues

I noticed that the about scroller would render zone sprites on the scrolling text sprite.

I fixed this by hiding all the zone sprites in the same way that i do with the CRT overlay when rendering the text, and then restoring them straight afterwards.

A new build

Having completed all the cards in the Trello, the next thing I did was to compile a new build and get that uploaded to the store.

This reminded me that I still have to create the store page for Flappy-vaders. This also gives me a reason to write a guide on ASO, which is important for increasing organic reach of your game’s store page.

I’m hoping that the testers don’t find too many more bugs in this build 🤞

The competition

There’s still time to enter the competition. I’m giving away a Dev with Dave mug, like the one I’m always drinking tea out of.

The link below takes you to a Facebook post on the Dev with Dave, where you find out how to enter.

https://fb.watch/qQfR-EQtHV/

The closing date for the competition is the 31st of March, so there’s still time for you to enter.

Marketing plan

Now the game is approaching completion, I need to get the marketing plan finished so that I can move up to the next level of marketing.

I already have created a 12 week plan to leverage social media, but I am also looking at running paid adverts. As I explained in the last update, due to real life stuff, I don’t think I quite have the budget spare that I wanted to spend promoting my game. But I am still planning how the ads will look, even if I can only use a few of the channels I want to use.

Once I am a little more decided on what I am doing, promotion wise, I will write about it. I don’t think I can really right now. Please stay tuned however.

That’s all for now

Now that all the Trello cards are done, the next update will be entirely devoted to marketing.

I am going to try and have at least all aspects of the marketing strategy outlined roughly, even if the details will still need working out.

Anyway, I hope you all have an enjoyable couple of weeks, and I’ll be back in a fortnight with the next Dev with Dave Game Progress Update 😊

Game Progress Update #78

Hello world! And welcome to the seventy eighth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

This is a monumental update, as it marks three years of work on the game. I know that Dev with Dave originally started in June, but I have taken a fair amount of time off for things like Christmas.

I regret not using an app to track how many hours I have put into working on this game. That certainly would have provided an interesting statistic.

However, Since the game is so very close to completion, I felt like celebrating. I have been trying to organise a few prizes for a competition for you all! More news on that later!

Also I have not forgotten about the blog regarding keeping your audience safe. It’s taken a little longer than expected, but I am still working on it whenever I can.

Anyway, time is short today. I really want to get this post finished by the deadline if possible, as I’d like to do other things later. So on with the update!

What’s on the cards?

Just like the last update, at the start of this fortnight, there was only one card remaining on the Trello “In progress” list. That was the level difficulty one.

The goal of this card was to try and find a way to balance the game play a little, as the player got faster.

There are also five cards in the “Known bugs/issues” list, but I do not expect they will take a lot of work to do (Famous last words…)

Level Difficulty

After considering the pros and cons of adjusting the spacing of the existing zones depending on the players speed, or limiting zones so they only appear when a specific speed is reached.

After some experimentation (read as many many many hours of playing the game) I found that the existing system worked better over a greater range of speeds that any changes I made. With perhaps the exception of one or two of the zones.

I also added a few new zones. These were sketched out on paper first, and were then created in game. To save time I didn’t create a level editor for Flappy-vaders. Instead, each zone is stored in a string where the length of the zone, and then the coordinates and image used for each sprite.

It was a little frustrating creating the new zones by hand, especially with this week feeling so busy. But I didn’t think it was really worth the effort. Especially considering how small the individual zones are.

I am going to mark this task off as done, and that leaves nothing but bug fixes and little tweaks to be done.

Bug fixes

I even managed to fix the first of the bugs! (Despite adding two more to the list during testing)

The bug was related to the games CRT overlay disappearing when the about scroller was called. After some code following, I found the issue was from when I was last recording footage for promo stuff.

When I am making game play videos of the game, I remove the CRT border scanlines from the game when I record footage. These are then reapplied in post production as the video is edited. I had commented out all the lines where the CRT border was toggled to on for this. However, once I had finished recording, I had missed uncommenting a line.

Leveraging Social Media

The rest of my time was taken up with finalising plans for the social media side of my marketing plan for the game.

During the creation of the game, I have occasionally dropped a mention of the game in various Facebook groups etc. Now the game is almost finished, I am getting ready to step up my organic marketing plan. I just need to decide on the last couple of aspects.

My goal was to create an eight to twelve week social media plan for the related groups. When I was explaining this to my buddy the other day, he asked if I was going to upload these plans and share them like I have everything else. The answer is maybe.

I have actually planned it all out on paper (as is my way I have created a daily check list to help maintain group activity as well. I am aiming at checking each group 3x a day, those times being 10am, 2pm, and 8pm. Then commenting on other peoples posts, especially if it is particularly relevant to the game. These times are arbitrary, and are just convenient for me. I will review them after a week or two. Depending on how often the groups receive posts.

For those familiar with Pareto’s Principle, I am using an 80/20 approach with sharing about my game. Meaning, that out of 10 weekly posts, a maximum of 2 of them will be about my game.

Other marketing channels

I as hoping to be at least best part done with the plan for paid ads by now. Sadly events in the real world have severely limited my options with this. My car broke down recently, and sadly it is beyond economic repair. Because of this, I am not sure if I can still spare the budget I was hoping to allocate to this.

I will probably plan for all methods I was planning to implement. But only put into action those which I have budget to do effectively, if the budget is indeed limited.

That’s all for now!

I haven’t had time to release a new test build as yet. I will probably hold off on that until the last half a dozen remaining bugs are fixed.

But I expect to have fixed a whole lot of the bugs by the next update. I expect the next test build will be the final one unless we discover any more bugs in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned to Dev with Dave on social media for news of the competition.

Until next time 🙂

Game Progress Update #77

Hello World! Welcome the the seventy seventh Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! It’s been another busy couple of weeks here in Dave’s world. Work on keeping up my existing apps and games on the various stores has become a bit of a priority and has taken up quite a lot of whatever spare time I would ordinarily have spent working on the game.

It was also Valentine’s day this week, which I spent having an enjoyable chinese meal with my gf while we watched Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 classic, Silent Running.

As always I have managed to get some work on the game. I have split my time two ways mostly this update. The first half of my efforts was spent on working on the remaining Trello card. The other half was spent on planning and implementing a social media strategy, preparing to promote the game.

Level Difficulty

I have been working on this card for a while now. It is the last remaining card on the Trello board which isn’t a bug fix. Carrying on from >the last progress update<, I have been mulling over how best to handle this.

My current thinking is to have a wider range of zones created, and record a maximum speed for each zone. I plan on doing this by manually setting the specified zone for testing, and also manually setting the speed variable each test.

This is proving to be quite a slow process, not helped by the fact that the game is quite a lot of fun to play.

I have so far created several new zones. Compared to the first few zones I made, these are more varied in the objects used. I have also made more use of the ceiling to floor pipes which I thought were lacking in the other zones.

Social Media

The other half of my efforts have been spent working on the marketing strategy.

For those who have not been following along, I am going to be concentrating my marketing in three specific areas.

• Organic social media promotion
• Paid advertising
• Website with email capture to build email list

The general plan for the three areas are as follows..

Organic Social Media Promotion

As I mentioned in the previous progress update post. I have already selected and joined several Facebook groups which seem to fit the target demographic. I am planning a series of of scheduled posts to these, as well as regularly checking and interacting with other peoples posts.

Paid advertising

Paid for advertising is a little less well planned. I’m not entirely decided on how much budget will be available for this. I expect I will use a variety of adverts to direct people towards social media or the landing page during the pre-launch campaign.

Then I will switch efforts to promoting the store page with a Google UAC advert when the game is finally released.

This will coincide with a renewed effort on the social media front as well.

Website with email capture to build email list

As I am just using a simple landing page with email capture for this, I haven’t really been able to use SEO to bring people to the page. Instead I am planning on using social media and adverts to drive people to the landing page and to leave their email address.

Once the game is closer to release, then I will use the list to send a few emails (A week, before, the day of release, and a few days afterwards) to announce the release to those interested.

Perfectionism strikes

I have also decided that I don’t like the text at the end of the game which says “Tap to try again”. It doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the UI particularly well.

Instead I will replace it with either a button with the same text, or a duplication of the two buttons from the title screen (the menu hamburger and the play button).

I would still like the button(s) to remain hidden until the speed has reduced enough, just like the current line of text does.

I have added this to the Trello as a new card in the Known bug/issues column.

That’s all for now

That’s all I have time for this week. I’m already two hours late publishing this post, and I have still to create the social media posts for it as well!

I’ll be back in two weeks time, with the next update. It’s a special one next time as it’s number 78. This marks THREE YEARS of me working on Flappy-vaders. If time allows, I will try and do something special to celebrate this.

In the mean time, It’s time for me to go.

Catch you all later 🙂

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.

Progress Update #74

Hello World! Welcome to the seventy fourth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It’s the last update of the year, so I have tried to make this a good one. Although you know how life has been here the last few months. No doubt more obstacles will be thrown in the path of progress before the week is out.

Still, lets just put our best foot forward and try to make it to the end of the year!

Let me tell you about what I managed to do this update.,

Jobs for this update

We started the week with two cards left over on the Trello. I dragged the last three cards over from the Things to do list. This left us with the following tasks to do this update.

• Increase difficulty and rewards for the daily missions
• Level difficulty
• Add timers to rewarded ads
• More scratch card skins
• Balance trophies

I doubt I will get all these done. But I will do my best to work through them all though, as it’s the last update of the year.

I also aim to get a new build uploaded and pushed out to the store. This is so the Beta team can spend the festive period playing Flappy-vaders and hunting for bugs. As well as looking into the social media groups I joined the other day.

Increasing difficulty and reward of daily missions

The first thing I looked at this update was where I had left off with the coding last. The Daily missions.

I had been working on a system which increases the difficulty and rewards of a daily mission. Once that mission has been completed a set number of times.

However, as I said in the last update (which you can read >here<), it didn’t work too well. There was a bug which caused the reward to only show the correct value when the app is first run for the day. Every subsequent run would see the reward value drop to the base score.

It took rather longer than I had hoped to fix this issue. All the code seemed to be correct, but I did eventually find the mistake.

It checks to see if the missions have expired during the startup when they are loaded, . If the missions needed to be refreshed, everything was ok. But if the missions hadn’t expired, I found that the code to calculate the reward values was being called BEFORE the mission progress data was loaded in! So all missions were appearing to be at progress level 0!

Once I knew what the issue was it was simple to just move that line of code to later in the function.

New bugs 😢

Adding the code to increase the difficulty and rewards of the daily missions has introduced a new bug. It increases the number of days which the player needs to collect a daily prize, but it doesn’t show this change. The mission simply reads “Collect a daily prize” regardless of how many the player is required to collect.

I have added it as a new card to the Known bugs/issues list. I will attempt to fix it at some point in the future.

Add timers to rewarded ads

There are two places in the game where rewarded ads are used. There is the button in the Daily Prizes screen which rewards you with a new scratch card. Also there is a button in the Coins screen, which rewards you with n coins when a video is watched.

Both these need some kind of timer to be displayed to show the player when an advert is next available.

What I would like, is once the button is pressed, that a period of time must elapse before the player can press it again. So instead of the text reading “Get 10 coins with a video”, once it’s pressed, it will say “Next video available in 00:05:00”.

Once the count down is finished, then the text returns to the previous string.

I am unsure if I will create a new script for handling the rewarded ads and their timers. It might be easier to simply add the code to the existing scripts which handle the daily prizes and coin purchasing.

//	This type is to store the data for the rewarded video timers (might consider moving this to the player script if its problematic to implement)
Type tRewardedAdsData
	
	coinsAdvertTimer as integer
	prizesAdvertTimer as integer
	
EndType

I added the new variables to the UI script in the end. Their functionality is largely tied in to the User Interface, so it makes sense. (At least currently, lol. I left a note in the code about moving it to the player script if I had too much trouble implementing it)

I defined the variables as integers as previous count downs have been using Unix Time. Although this one will only be for 5 or 10 minutes, so I may switch it over to use the Timer() function which returns a float.

I decided to functionise the code which provided the time in UnixTime. This made it easier to call from serveral places rather than duplicating the code.

I also realised that the two rewarded advert systems must have been written on completely different days because they are not remotely similar. One creates its own self contained loop which handles playing the advert, then checking and awarding the reward. The other is more integrated into the main loop.

Sadly, I ran out of time before completing this card. It’s an hour to go until this blog post and accompanying social media posts are due. So I had probably best call it a day.

Pressing both buttons now stores the delay timer value in the appropriate variable. The text on the button is also changed. The next thing I need to do is to get the text to count down, which should be straight forward.

As you can see from the image above, I also need to work on the actual text for this button. It works fine in the daily prize page however.

New build released for testers

The latest build went live earlier this week. If you would like to be involved in play testing the game then its not too late. Simply drop me a message on social media and I’ll sign you up.

This also led to me doing some of the basic setup for the store page while I was on the site and had a few minutes spare.

Website

I also purchased a domain for the website, and made an attempt to set up a landing page (it’s still a work in progress, but feel free to have a look and see www.flappy-vaders.co.uk)

The key elements are there however, the trailer video, call to action, email capture etc.,

I still need to connect the email form to MailChimp or whichever service I am using for it.

That’s all for now

There is still a week of social media and working on things left to go before I take a break for Christmas, but the next Dev with Dave progress update will be available on the 19th of January, next year.

If I don’t speak to you before, have a happy Christmas and a Brilliant New Years.