Game Progress Update #78

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

This is a monumental update, as it marks three years of work on the game. I know that Dev with Dave originally started in June, but I have taken a fair amount of time off for things like Christmas.

I regret not using an app to track how many hours I have put into working on this game. That certainly would have provided an interesting statistic.

However, Since the game is so very close to completion, I felt like celebrating. I have been trying to organise a few prizes for a competition for you all! More news on that later!

Also I have not forgotten about the blog regarding keeping your audience safe. It’s taken a little longer than expected, but I am still working on it whenever I can.

Anyway, time is short today. I really want to get this post finished by the deadline if possible, as I’d like to do other things later. So on with the update!

What’s on the cards?

Just like the last update, at the start of this fortnight, there was only one card remaining on the Trello “In progress” list. That was the level difficulty one.

The goal of this card was to try and find a way to balance the game play a little, as the player got faster.

There are also five cards in the “Known bugs/issues” list, but I do not expect they will take a lot of work to do (Famous last words…)

Level Difficulty

After considering the pros and cons of adjusting the spacing of the existing zones depending on the players speed, or limiting zones so they only appear when a specific speed is reached.

After some experimentation (read as many many many hours of playing the game) I found that the existing system worked better over a greater range of speeds that any changes I made. With perhaps the exception of one or two of the zones.

I also added a few new zones. These were sketched out on paper first, and were then created in game. To save time I didn’t create a level editor for Flappy-vaders. Instead, each zone is stored in a string where the length of the zone, and then the coordinates and image used for each sprite.

It was a little frustrating creating the new zones by hand, especially with this week feeling so busy. But I didn’t think it was really worth the effort. Especially considering how small the individual zones are.

I am going to mark this task off as done, and that leaves nothing but bug fixes and little tweaks to be done.

Bug fixes

I even managed to fix the first of the bugs! (Despite adding two more to the list during testing)

The bug was related to the games CRT overlay disappearing when the about scroller was called. After some code following, I found the issue was from when I was last recording footage for promo stuff.

When I am making game play videos of the game, I remove the CRT border scanlines from the game when I record footage. These are then reapplied in post production as the video is edited. I had commented out all the lines where the CRT border was toggled to on for this. However, once I had finished recording, I had missed uncommenting a line.

Leveraging Social Media

The rest of my time was taken up with finalising plans for the social media side of my marketing plan for the game.

During the creation of the game, I have occasionally dropped a mention of the game in various Facebook groups etc. Now the game is almost finished, I am getting ready to step up my organic marketing plan. I just need to decide on the last couple of aspects.

My goal was to create an eight to twelve week social media plan for the related groups. When I was explaining this to my buddy the other day, he asked if I was going to upload these plans and share them like I have everything else. The answer is maybe.

I have actually planned it all out on paper (as is my way I have created a daily check list to help maintain group activity as well. I am aiming at checking each group 3x a day, those times being 10am, 2pm, and 8pm. Then commenting on other peoples posts, especially if it is particularly relevant to the game. These times are arbitrary, and are just convenient for me. I will review them after a week or two. Depending on how often the groups receive posts.

For those familiar with Pareto’s Principle, I am using an 80/20 approach with sharing about my game. Meaning, that out of 10 weekly posts, a maximum of 2 of them will be about my game.

Other marketing channels

I as hoping to be at least best part done with the plan for paid ads by now. Sadly events in the real world have severely limited my options with this. My car broke down recently, and sadly it is beyond economic repair. Because of this, I am not sure if I can still spare the budget I was hoping to allocate to this.

I will probably plan for all methods I was planning to implement. But only put into action those which I have budget to do effectively, if the budget is indeed limited.

That’s all for now!

I haven’t had time to release a new test build as yet. I will probably hold off on that until the last half a dozen remaining bugs are fixed.

But I expect to have fixed a whole lot of the bugs by the next update. I expect the next test build will be the final one unless we discover any more bugs in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned to Dev with Dave on social media for news of the competition.

Until next time 🙂