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 🙂