Game Progress Update #59

Hello world! And welcome to the fifty ninth Dev with Dave game progress update!

It’s been a very busy couple weeks, as I have had a website launch to be dealing with for my day job. This has eaten into my spare time quite drastically. Some days I didn’t even get to do my dailys in Fortnite! 🙁 lol

I thought I would be able to find an hour or two which would otherwise be wasted whilst shopping at the weekend. But as I was saying Monday, I took the tablet along to the shopping centre. But couldn’t find a coffee shop with a spare table.

I eventually remembered that the Willen Hospice charity shop had a cafe, so made my way over there. However, after I had got a tea and sat down, I discovered there was no wifi or signal on my phone. This meant I couldn’t work on the game.

I did manage to get some work done on the game in the shape of some bug fixes, and some graphical work. Let me tell you about what I have done.

Bug fixes

Start/End of game variable resetting

First I looked at the Start/End of game variable resetting problem. This was most noticeable when starting the second game. When the bug occurs, the player has to sit waiting for ages before the first obstacles appear.

The hardest part of this bug turned out to be tracking down what variable was causing the issue in the first place. lol.

It turned out that the currentZone.length# property was the cause of the delays. I did not reset the variable when the player died. So the value remained the previous zones length when a new game started. This caused the player to wait till the distance travelled was greater than the length before it would spawn a fresh zone.

This was a simple fix. I added a line to the “post end of game” section which basically reset the value of length# to zero.

Bullet remaining into new game

The next bug I fixed was a known bug, but I’d neglected to write it a card (or if I had I couldn’t see it). I’m talking about the Bullets remaining into new game issue. I remembered it while I was busy trying to fix the previous issue.

I wrote a function called DestroyAllBullets() which called the DestroyBullet() function for each bullet where the inUse flag was true.

Another easy fix. I will be careful this does not lull me into a false sense of security lol!

Game over screen problem

The Game over screen problem card was the next one I looked at. This listed two problems, one being that the zones are supposed to finish once a game is over; but that no longer happens (it used to, I’m 100% sure). The other was that the Game over screen text read “tap to continue” even though the game won’t actually let you tap until the speed has dropped.

I added a line or two of code into the game over screen code which simply checked if the speed was high enough to prevent moving on to the next bit, or if it was slow enough to continue. It then hides or shows the “tap to continue” text accordingly.

The other issue was caused by the isGameOver variable being incorrectly set. I had previously rejiggered the game loop to allow for the post game boosts like the self destruct. which had caused the previous code which set the isGameOver variable to be triggered too late.

I rearranged the previous code so that the isGameOver variable is set to false at the start of a new game, and to true at the end.

Not so much a bug..

I also did the Daily mission/Trophy fanfare card. Sometimes the fanfare got lost when the music was playing, so I decided to try and quieten it a little when the fanfare was playing.

The original plan was to have two sections of code which reduced the music in volume when the fanfare started, and then a second piece of code to return to normal when the fanfare finished.

I had issues trying to do this though. So instead I added a conditional in the UpdateMusic() function. This checks if the Fanfare is playing and sets the music volume accordingly.

Some new graphics as well

I even managed to find some time on Wednesday to create some icons for the coin packs on the store.

Like all the 2D assets for the game, I created the coin pack icons in Paint.net. It was hard to find balance between how many coins could fit in the space allowed. The space reserved for the icon is only 26 x 22 pixels.

It took me around two days to create, polish and finalise all the icons for the coins page on the store.

I did try and create a video to demonstrate all the new icons I had created for this page. But for some reason Hit Film was not playing ball particularly well. I will try and do the video again at some point when I have more time.

Thats all for now.

And that is about all I have managed to get done this time round. I doubt muchly I’ll get anything done to Flappy-vaders this weekend. It’s one of the Grand children’s birthdays tomorrow and I really need to tidy up my garden on Sunday. Weather permitting, lol.

I’ll be back on it next week though.