Game Progress Update #72

Hello world! And welcome to the seventy second Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! I feel like this last couple of weeks has been a little better than the last one.

There has still been plenty of unwanted drama keeping me away from the keyboard, but I have managed to get a bit done to the game. I’m starting to think I should give up my career as a developer to instead write for the soap operas.

I even had to contend with Trello going down while I was trying to finish this blog post! Which is most unusual. Anyway, lets have a look at what I did manage to get done this week..

Plan for this update

Carrying on from the last progress update, there are the following things to do in the In progress column of the Trello board this update.

• Review phase 1 cards
• Increase difficulty and rewards of daily missions
• Level difficulty

There are only a handful of the review phase 1 cards left. These are ones which needed boosts to be unlocked and purchased first, which I didn’t have the coin for. This time round I will edit the game to award me several thousand coins. I couldn’t do this last update as I was away from the PC, playing the compiled version on my phone.

Review phase 1 cards

Once I had added the line which awarded the player 250,000 coins, it was straight forward to test the remaining phase 1 cards.

It only took an hour or so to play the game enough to have completed the last few cards. Well, to be honest, I probably could have done it in half the time, but the game is quite addictive, lol.

The cards were fairly straight forward to check. They were things like the head start not playing the shield sound effect, or purchasing or using boosts not changing the UI values accordingly.

I also made sure that I removed the line of code which award the extra coins for testing purposes, when I finished testing.

Increase difficulty and rewards of daily missions

Reading back over the code..

At first glance, it didn’t seem as though I had added much in the way of code to handle the progression of the daily missions.

There was a missionTotals[] variable, but there was nothing in the comments or the like describing what it’s purpose was. I had actually commented it’s definition, but nothing helpful about what I was intending to use it for.

A little digging later, and I found that in both the load and save daily mission data functions, I had referred to the variable in the comments as “the mission totals count”. It’s my belief that I had intended this array to store the number of times each daily mission had been completed.

No matter how many times I say about HOW VERY IMPORTANT commenting your code is, for exactly this reason; I still find myself causing extra work by not doing it.

Making some changes

Going from here, I added a second variable to the type which is to track the current level of each daily mission. The plan is that once the specific mission types Total has exceeded a set value, then the total is reset to zero and the level value is increased. The level value is used to determine the difficulty and reward of the mission.

added a line to the calculate the reward function for missions, which just times the level value by ten to get the reward value.

Changing the target value however, was a lot trickier. Each mission type has its own initial target value ranging from 1 to 50. Ideally, I need to write a function like the one which calculates the reward value. This would allow me to As I felt on a bit pressured for time, I am kludging it for now, by simply multiplying the initial value by the mission type level value. I can always revisit it in the future if the values need changing.

I need to get the test build uploaded so I can test this. In order to check the code works, I need to play the game for five days consecutively. (Unless I cheekily change the value, so I can check it later this evening once the roll-over has happened 🙂 )

I still need to verify that this all works, but that will take a few days unfortunately. So I won’t know the results until next week.

Level difficulty

I didn’t manage to get any coding related to this last card done this time round. I did however get some thinking done about how this will work.

The issue is that as the game speed increases, it makes some of the zones very tricky to get through. It can leave the game feeling as though the difficulty suddenly ramps up, disproportionately so at times. So the plan for this card is to devise something to lessen this effect.

I’m unsure if I want to implement any of the following methods to try and add a bit more playability to the game.,

• create a system which adapts the levels by increasing the distance between obstacles slightly.
• Create several new levels, and develop a system to separate slow and faster levels.
• Tweak the existing levels so they work better with a wider range of speeds

Ideally I would like to create at least twice as many zones as there are already, to prevent the game from becoming too repetitive, too quickly.

GDD Update

As well as all of the above stuff, I took the opportunity of updating the GDD with all the changes which were marked in the completed cards I reviewed from phase 1.

There aren’t many changes. The biggest ones were relating to the daily prizes and missions. There are a few minor changes however as well.

Click the link below to download it.

That’s all for now

Once again I’ll be back in another fortnight with more news about the game.

I’m aware that I need to be working on the marketing strategy, especially considering how near to completion the game is. Aside from one video trailer I made, I’ve not really done anything on this apart from a few pages of notes. I’m not sure if I should include this in the progress update, or perhaps write a separate blog post about it. (Or maybe both, lol, who knows)

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post. I’ll see you again in two weeks.