Game Progress Update #76

Hello World, and welcome to the seventy sixth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I’ve not managed to get quite as much done as I would have liked to do.

It was my girlfriends birthday at the end of last month. She had a lovely day, we had a party in the evening with drinks, a buffet and a few friends. Unfortunately, she overdid things and has been laid up on the sofa with a bad back since.

I also have been suffering with a toothache the last couple of days. This has not helped my concentration or my ability to work on the game.

On the plus side, It’s a lot warmer now. I hope that the worst of the winter is over. I am looking forward to getting out with the laptop or tablet.

It would sure be nice to get some coding done without Khaleesi getting in the way, lol

Anyway, let’s see what I managed to get done this week…

In this update..

I managed to get an amazing amount done in the >previous update<. I left only one card still to do in the in progress column of the >Trello board<.

• Level difficulty

I also planned on trying to get some of the new bugs which had appeared recently fixed also. Sadly, fate had other ideas.

Level difficulty

Despite spending most of my spare time this update thinking about how to adjust the level difficulty. There is little to show for it here but a few scribbled ideas on paper,

I refuse point blank to scan in 4 pages of notes (and awful handwriting) and use that for the blog! I think I have left it a little late to mock some of the ideas up in paint.net or the game itself to demonstrate the ideas.

Initially I was thinking that I may increase the gaps between obstacles in relation to the speed of the players ship. I think if this was proportional, it would still give the impression that the game was getting harder. It would be a gentler transition for the player however.

I am now leaning towards having several sets of levels which are only selected if the speed is inside a specific range. Even if this means having 2 or 3 similar levels which simple have larger spacing between the objects.

Social media leveraging

I had a quick run through of the Facebook groups I had considered as potential groups for marketing my game in. Of the six I originally selected, I have decided that four are ideal for my needs.

As I said in >this previous blog post<, it is important when you join a new group to interact and get to know the community before trying to promote your game. Any group with active administration will frown upon newcomers who just spam the group with promotional material.

I have developed a posting plan for each of the groups. These plan out over the next few weeks, a number of posts which fit the group which I shall be posting. I will also try and comment on a handful of other peoples posts in the group as well.

I don’t expect I will post anything about my game in any of these groups for a month or two yet.

And that’s all I’m afraid..

That’s all there is I’m afraid. It’s time to publish this post, and share the social media posts. As much as I’d love to squeeze in a couple more hours working on the game, I need to do other things.

Fingers crossed, I will be able to do much more to the game in time for the next update. I also hope that the universe won’t throw quite so many obstacles in the way.

Until next time…