Game Progress Update #68
Hello world, and welcome to the sixty eighth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.
It’s not been the best couple of weeks for working on this. As you all know, I am doing it in my spare time, and unfortunately my girlfriend is once again laid up with a bad back. Which means that I have not had anywhere near as much free time as I would have liked.
Combine that with running “Dad’s Taxi” for the children who seem to have had an abundance of appointments, and you’ll end up with a slightly stressed Dave who hasn’t had much chance to work on Flappy-vaders.
Throw in a week of ridiculous weather as well, and you start to get an idea of how this last two weeks have gone.
Fortunately we have the Hot tub set up in the garden still (It’s usually packed away by now) so I have been able to cool off in the water on the worst of the hot days.
Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. Let me get on and tell you about what I have done to the game this update.
The plan for this fortnight
After all the bugs I got fixed in the last update, here are only two bugs left in the known bugs/issues column on the Trello board.
- Distance Issues
- Stutter during gameplay
I am hoping to get both of these fixed and maybe even have time to start on the Phase 2 stuff.
Distance issues
I’m hoping this will be a simple bug to fix, so I have chosen this to be the first thing I look at.
The problem is that the Daily missions and the Trophies seem to check the distance travelled differently. For example, I completed a daily mission (Travel 25m), but the Trophy (Travel 25m) was not.
I need to look to see whether the code which compares the distances in the two cases is the same, or at least using the same calculation to work out distance.
Step one is to look and find where the two checks are made. This involves simply reading through the code and following its order of execution. Although its not a particularly fun or interesting thing to do.
I found the code which updated the daily mission distance variable in the IncreasePlayerScore() function. It is increased by 1 every time the player travels 144px (in game size), it’s the size of an old 4:3 TV episode on a widescreen device.
The other piece of the riddle was in the Trophies script. It was however calculating the distance in a completely different way.
Once I had found the issues, it was a fairly simple job to get both sets of code producing the same results.
Stutter during gameplay
Sadly I didn’t get this one finished this update. I managed to get as far as thinking about how I am going to determine what is causing it.
I haven’t even managed to grab any video of it happening. As I cannot replicate the issue on demand as yet. Intermittent problems are the worst kind.
I’m certain AGK Studio has some commands for performance checking. I will look into those and see if they might be helpful for this.
Phase 2
I did manage to get some thought put into Phase 2 however during some AFK time.
Phase 2 is mostly about adding longevity to the game play. I will be adding systems to increase the reward and difficulty of the daily missions; as well as looking into how we can adapt the levels depending on the speed of the player.
I’m leaning towards creating more levels and then give each level a speed rating, so the are not selected if the game is going to quickly or slowely. Then I just need to create several sets of levels so no variety is lost as the player speeds up.
Anyway, I shall talk more about phase 2 once the stuttering bug has been resolved.
That’s all for now
Once again I have run out of time, and the deadline for publishing this blog post draws near. So I shall sign off for now. I’ll be back in two weeks, with another fun packed and exciting* game progress update.
See you all next time!
* May not actually be fun packed or exciting