Game Progress Update #70

Hello world! And welcome to the seventieth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

It just occurred to me that when we reach the seventy eighth game progress update, that means I’ll have been working on Flappy-vaders for three years in real time. Since I’m only working on it part time, this equates to around a year, perhaps a year and a half of actual development time.

(I certainly wasn’t expecting this to take quite as long as it has when I began this journey! 😅)

We’re in the final stretch now, I really should be getting busy thinking about how I’m going to promote the game when it’s released (And before!), and designing, if not creating assets to use in the promotion.

I’ve not really thought much about promoting the game since Update 66. Which is when I last worked on the promotional video. (It’s >here< if you want to have a look)

This time round

I have moved three cards into the In Progress list on the Trello board.

• Add a back button to the daily prize awarded screen
• Make icons for the Daily Missions screen
• Review phase 1 things in the Under Review list.

Add a back button to the Daily prize awarded screen

I was hoping this would be a simple case of adding a UI element to the existing UI page when I selected this task off the Things to do list on the Trello. But when I checked the UI pages I couldn’t see it.

I had a look again at the screen in action, and saw that it appeared to be a sprite overlay, rather than a UI page, as the scratcher UI page is visible underneath. This rules out my original fix, and means it’ll probably take a lot longer to sort out. 😞

After some investigation, I found where the code for the overlay sprite was being called from. It was a straight forward job to pass the function a reference to the UI and add a back button. This code could hide and show at the same time as the sprite overlay. All I’d need to do is ensure that the button’s draw depth is above the overlay panel.

With that in mind, I set off the the UI script to find a back button from an existing page to copy and paste onto the scratcher page.

Except.

There aren’t any? All the other UI pages just use the “Left facing triangle” icon in the top left corner of the screen.

I’m not sure why I thought the game needed a back button on this particular screen, but it seems to break continuity of the UI design to add one. Because of this, I have decided not to it after all.

Make icons for the Daily Missions screen

A bit of an oversight perhaps, but I noticed the Daily missions screen had only grey boxes instead of icons. Fixing this was added to the Phase 2, the polishing phase.

There are I think, five types of Daily Mission. Each one needs it’s own icon to represent it.

• Score x amount of points
• Travel x distance
• Collect a daily prize
• Play x number of games
• Collect x coins

Initially I sat down at my desk with some paper and a pencil and started thinking. Some of the icons were obvious to me. I could simply reuse a coin icon from another menu, for example.

Even with the limited 22 x 22 pixel size, It didn’t take long to create the several of the icons.

Traveling distance however, was proving to be quite a challenge. I couldn’t think of a single concept or idea to represent traveling distance which would fill the tiny grey square.

I finally ended up using ChatGPT and Bind AI Image generator to help me come up with some ideas. You can read all about my experience using AI in this blog post.

The image above shows a few of the icons I created in place in the Daily Missions screen. The bottom one is the travel distance Icon which I had difficulties with. Until ultimately I sought the help of AI.

Review completed tasks from Phase 1

With the other two tasks out the way. It meant I had chance to review some of the cards in the Under Review list on Trello.

This meant I had to sit for a few hours with the Trello open, playing Flappy-vaders! It’s a tough job, lol, but someone has to do it.

I quickly got into a habit of reading the next card, and having a turn at the game. Fortunately the first few cards were easy enough to check in a single game.

Overall I think I managed to move 15 cards from under review to the completed list. At least before it was time to finish the blog post and do all the social media as well! lol

There are still loads of cards to verify, so I expect I’ll still be doing this next week. A lot of them mean editing the game so I have enough coins to buy unlocks and powerups so I can test some of the other cards.

That’s all for now

That’s all I have time for now I’m afraid.

Sorry the social media posting has been a bit sporadic the last few weeks. Other things have been getting in the way. Sadly real life things which I can’t just push to one side.

I will definitely be back in a fortnight, and I’ll try and do a better job with the social media stuff 😊

Until next time..