Game Progress Update #73

Hello world, and welcome to the seventy third Dev with Dave game progress update!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, fortunately, not in the catastrophic disaster filled way that the previous month or two seemed to have been. Although both the oven and my kettle broke, which are pretty disaster like from where I sit. I was boiling water in a saucepan to make tea with for more days than I care to think.

However, I have a new kettle now and hopefully, we will be getting a new oven in the next few days 🤞.

This week I have spent my time at the keyboard working on the In progress list on the Trello board. And the time AFK I used to work on the pre-launch marketing drive.

What’s on the cards today?

There are two cards still waiting to be done in the list on the Trello, these are..

• Increase difficulty & rewards of daily missions
• Level difficulty

Increase difficulty & rewards of daily missions

Carrying on from last weeks update >here<, I have been playing and checking the game most days and have made the following discoveries.

At first glance, everything seems to be working correctly. But a little more digging soon revealed that the first time the game is run in a day, it works fine. But every subsequent time it’s run, for some reason the reward isn’t being calculated correctly and displays as 10 when it should say 20.

The target calculation seems to be working properly. I had shortened the number of times a player had to complete a mission type in order to speed up testing. I managed to get 3 of the mission types levelled up to at least the second level.

When I was getting ready to mark it off as done, I noticed it wasn’t working properly (Typical). It took a few days to even verify that it was happening, as the issue only occurs on the first run of each day.

Unfortunately it proved to be a somewhat troublesome bug to locate. I ran out of time before I managed to resolve it. But I will resume again next week.

Pre-launch marketing plan

The other thing I spend most of my away from my desk time doing, was working on the pre-launch marketing plan. I will of course be following my own advice from the blogs I posted on promotion earlier. You can read the first one >here<.

The plan is to start building hype for the game as soon as possible. I will be using organic social media and paid adverts to try and grow an audience. Although as the launch grows closer, I am concerned about what kind of budget I will end up having for that.

I have found a few target-demographic type groups to join on Facebook. These will be investigated once they have accepted my requests, and if they are suitable for my needs, then I will see about posting regularly and becoming part of the community.

I have also decided on a few suitable hashtags to use for other social media. Although I haven’t yet decided exactly what platforms I will be using for promotion as yet.

Quite a large part of the planning, will be deciding what media assets I will need for the various posts and ads over the duration of the prelaunch.

I also am planning on using a landing page with a form to capture email addresses.

I will share more details on this in the next update, but I am aware that the time is getting on and I am already late publishing this post.

That’s all for now

I think that’s all I have time for this update. I will as always be back in two weeks, on the 8th of December. But then I will be taking some time off from sitting behind the computer to spend some time with the family over Christmas.

Normal service will resume in the New Year, and the first Update of 2024 will be on the 5th January.

So until then, I will see you all in a fortnight.