Game Progress Update #85

Hello World! And welcome to the eighty fifth Dev with Dave game progress update.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been a productive week. It was one of the children’s birthday, which was nice, but kept me away from the keyboard.

I also feel like I have been hyper-fixated on getting the email sequence written. I’ve spent practically all of my time this fortnight working on that.

I was hoping to get the bug in the IAP coin pack purchasing fixed, but I am still waiting for an update to the software I use to create the game to fix the current issue with uploading the next build.

Anyway let me tell you about what I have done since the last update.

Email Sequence

As I said above, I have been somewhat fixated on this. Possibly because I had been having difficulty finding the right words for them.

Thinking that it might make things easier if I could see what the emails look like, I opened up a new Brevo account specifically for this. They have a drag and drop visual editor for you to use. So you can see what the email looks like a lot better than you can in Word which I was previously using.

I decided on using a free account for now, but I can upgrade it nearer release if I find my email list becomes too large for the free daily amount of emails it can send. The monthly charge is something like £6 (About $7.60 US) so it’s not a huge amount.

Unfortunately, as I don’t know when the game will be released, I am unable to set the second sequence. This is the one which starts sending mails a few weeks before the release date.

Social Media Leveraging

I’d actually been a bit lapse with this the last few weeks. Despite having a posting schedule, I had neglected posting much and had barely even been interacting.

I’m sure I have said before that I struggle with this aspect of the promotion, as I cannot schedule SM posts in other peoples groups. This means I need to make any posts manually, which I am less than brilliant at remembering to do.

To combat this, I first made sure that both the photos I had taken, and the notes I had made were accessible from my phone. For this I used Microsoft OneDrive for file sharing, and OneNote for note taking. I use both these bits of software regularly and I cannot rate them highly enough.

I have also realised that I could well do with spending some time just creating assets of the game. Things for sharing on social media, like game play footage, or screen shots. I do not feel I have created any where near enough of these just yet.

At least one of the groups I am using for this aspect of promotion uses #ScreenShotSaturday. So it would make sense to capitalise on this also.

Delays

As I said earlier in the post, the project is currently being held back by several factors.

The first, and probably most frustrating, is that I am waiting for the software I used to create the game to be updated. I have access to a test build of the software, as the current build is using an out of date Billing library. However the test build has an issue with the compilation process which means that my game does not work.

Because of this I am unable to upload the next build for testing. So I don’t know if I have fixed the IAP issue or not.

This is also affecting any plans I had for advertising. Although I have not yet managed to get all the copy ready, a lot of the promotion needs to know what date the game is released in order to maximise the effectiveness of the advertising.

That’s all for now

And that is all I have time for this time round. I have a feeling the next couple of weeks will be fun as I will try and create some new graphical and video assets for social media, as well as hopefully finishing off the copy for the email sequences.

I might be lucky and be able to upload and test the next build, assuming that the issue with AGK Studio are fixed in time.