Game Progress Update #60

Hello World! Welcome to the sixtieth Dev with Dave Game progress Update.

I’m sorry the social media has been a little quiet this week, sadly my girlfriend once again ended up in hosptial for a few days thanks to her diabetes.

She’s back home now and is on the mend thankfully, but what with visiting her in hospital and trying to keep on top of everything else in her absence, I’ve had very little chance to work on the game.

That being said, I’ve been busy following on from Game Progress Update 59’s Bug fixing spree, and have managed to get through a couple of cards from the Known bugs/issues column on the trello. Here’s what I managed to get done.

Bug fixes

Powerup movement

The Powerup Movement card was the first one I had chance to look at. This card explained how I wasn’t happy that the sin wave used to determine the path of the pickup seemed to change as the game progressed.

I spent several hours first recording, then watching and comparing videos of gameplay

But no matter how fast I managed to get the game to play, the powerup path stayed the same. It only appears to change due to the game speeding up as it is played.

Missile Guidance Laser Transparency Issue

The next card on the list was the Missile Guidance Laser Transparency Issue. There were actually a few issues relating to the guidance laser system.

The lasers would occasionally show up in the wrong places, and with the incorrect transparency. Since it had been a long while since I wrote the system which controls this, the first thing I did was look over the code to refamiliarise myself with it. Fortunately I’d commented the code fairly well, and it wasn’t too hard to pick up.

It turned out that although the guidance laser sprites were hidden from view when they were finished with, their position was not being reset. I added a line of code to move the sprite offscreen when it was hidden.

This fixed all the issues with the lasers except one. Where a small unscaled laser would appear in the top left corner of the screen.

Another quick investigation of the code revealed that the the sprites were not repositioned at creation, so I added a line to move the sprites off screen when the guidance sprite was created.

This seemed to fix all the issues with the missiles and their guidance lasers. 🙂

Thats all for now

And that is all I have managed to get done this time round. I’m still hoping to get an updated build uploaded to the Play Store for the testers to get their hands on.

Hopefully I’ll be back in a fortnight with another update on the game.

See you next time 🙂