Game Progress Update #58

Hello world! And welcome to the fifty eighth Dev with Dave game Progress update!

It’s certainly been a couple of weeks for the weather. Every weather you can imagine has been thrown at us these last few days. We’ve had glorious warm sunshine, savage gale force winds, torrential rain, even hail! Often all in the same day!

I guess it’s the curse of the Easter weekend, with a bank holiday at either end.

I had a great time though, despite the weather. Over Easter, Me and my gf watched Monster Hunter on the TV, ate chocolate eggs, and a huge roast dinner as well.

I have managed to get some work done to the game though, I even had chance to sit outside and get some coding done in between the less pleasant weathery bits, lol.

IAP Ad Removal

I discovered that the new AGK IAP Commands suffered from the same delay/lag as the original ones did. So I am adding a small function from another app I wrote which resolves this.

This function simply checks the status of the IAP ad removal every five seconds for the first minute that the game is running. It’s a replacement for the original single check at the beginning of the code, which has since been removed.

	//	Kludge to fix the IAP issue...
	`	Only runs for 1 minute...
	If GetUnixTime() < startTime+60

		If iapTestTimer#+5.0 < system[0].sysTimer#
			
			iapTestTimer# = system[0].sysTimer#
			
			If GetInAppPurchaseAvailable(0) = true
				
				system[0].adsDisabled = true
				
				SetBannerAdVisible(false)
				
			Endif
			
		Endif
		
	Endif	

The above code is taken directly from the other App. But the basic functionality is what I need.

I may adapt this figure at a later date but I’ll see how well adding the function works. The goal is to not show after game ads ever to a player who has purchased ad removal.

Scratch card scratching action

Several people had suggested I shrank the scratcher sprite, to make the scratch card work more like a real card. But oddly enough shrinking the scratcher sprite has made it slower and less lifelike. Instead I have enlarged the size of the scratcher sprite.

GDPR Dialogue issues

I noticed that when testing the app on various devices that when the player is presented with the GDPR dialogue on first run, the player is sometimes thrown into the settings menu when exiting the page. This is not ideal or desired behaviour.

Testing revealed it to be an issue with the back button, the “no targetted ads” button, and the purchase ad removal button. The first two took the player to the settings when chosen. the Purchase ad removal button simply opened the IAP dialogue and did nothing else.

Fortunately the “Yes – targetted ads” button had all the necessary code in place, so it was a simple job of copying,pasting and tweaking the code to get the bugs fixed.

Music and sound default values

There was also an issue where the music and sound effects default to off when first run. This was another relatively quick bug to fix. I simply added a couple of lines to set the default values to 50 before creating the data file on the first run.

Quit button

The Quit button from the pause menu has also now been fixed. One of the testers reported that the quit button not only didn’t work, but trying to quit actually broke the game!

It turned out I hadn’t actually written the code for this. Now when the button is pressed it tells the game to jump into the “player death” bit, and go from there. There is no ship explosion though. Not sure if this is what I want yet. I’m still deciding how best to handle this.

Headstart Shield Placement

I also fixed the initial shield placement issue with the Head start boost. For the first frame it was displayed, it displayed at (0,0) rather than around the ship.

This was a simple fix involving setting the sprites initial position to the same as the players ships when the shield sprite was being spawned.

New test build

I am hoping to get a new test build with all these bug fixes compiled and uploaded today, as soon as I have finished this blog post and associated social media.

This will be the second test build to go out, despite what I said in the last blog post >here<, I didn’t manage to upload the new build in the end.

So if you are on the list of testers, check your inboxes this evening. You’ll (hopefully) have mail!

And thats all for now

That’s everything I have managed to do this update. I’ll be back once again in two weeks time with another update.

I’ll try and do a better job on the socials as well. I fear @DevWithDave has become fairly quiet of late, as all my time seems to be taken with other things.

Anyway, until next time friends 🙂