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 🙂