Game Progress Update #95

Hello world! And welcome to the ninety fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

Well, it’s well and truly winter. At least twice since the last update, I’ve woken up to freshly fallen snow outside. Not quite enough to make everything white, but certainly enough to be noticeable.

It’s been very cold though. Even though I have had the heating on for a great deal of the time, there is a chill in the air.

It’s also been quite a busy time as thoughts turn to getting things ready for Christmas, and I have been quite busy with other projects which need seasonal preparation. This has limited the time I have had to work on Flappy-vaders this time round.

The thing I have spent most my time on this time round, is getting social media assets ready to share on Flappy-vaders social media.

Let me tell you what I have been doing this last fortnight.

Bugs in the game

The more I play test the game, the longer the list of bugs grows on the Trello board. I know I mentioned this in the last progress update, but I have had little chance to work on fixing bugs.

The most concerning bug currently is the one which exists in the In app purchasing of the coin packs. I would much rather get this one fixed before release. I believe it’s an issue with App Game Kit Studio however. I’ve reported it on the Git Hub page, and am now just waiting for them to fix it.

The other bugs in the list shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to resolve. However, having an entire afternoon free to sit at the PC and fix bugs in the game is another thing, lol.

Social media assets

It occurred to me while I was writing up the emails for the email sequence, that I was going to need assets to share on the Flappy-vaders social media pages.

Remember, that I am going to be promoting this game through organic social media as well as paid adverts. Both of these will require video and image assets.

So I set about deciding on what kind of assets I could or should be using.

One of my ideas was a sequence of images and videos which would demonstrate various aspects of the game. things like game play, the pickups, boosts, etc.

I started with the pickups. My initial idea was to create a 10 second video which just had some text over the scrolling landscape backdrop. With the icon bouncing onto the screen, remaining for a few seconds before shrinking back down to nothing.

However, after creating it, I decided this was too long and boring. I decided to shorten this to maybe 3 or 4 seconds, and have some footage of the game with the player grabbing the pickup and demonstrating it’s use.

This meant creating specific zones which had the correct timing and elements to do exactly what I needed in the limited time allotted. These clips could only be 6 to 7 seconds long. The text would remain onscreen as well, so the game play really needs to be focused on the middle 3rd of the screen.

Sadly, this is quite a job as to save time, I never made a zone editor for the game. Instead I need to position all the elements manually by entering the coordinates directly into the zone data. *sigh*.

Lost files

One of my biggest issues when I am developing a game is losing the original files for things. Whether that’s the ttf file for the font, or the project file for a composite image which I need to edit but can only find bitmaps of.

Despite my best efforts, it seems to have happened again. I cannot find the original music file :/ I have the edited version in the games media file, where I have separated the intro from the loop, and converted them to Ogg Vorbis so I can programmatically adjust the speed.

However, Hitfilm, the software I use for post production video editing cannot load in Ogg Vorbis files.

I’m hoping that I have written down the details of the original file in my original notes. Otherwise I will have to re-join the ogg vorbis parts and convert it to mp3 again.

That’s all for now.

That’s all I have time for today. I will be back in two weeks with another update. Which, if I’m being honest will probably be just making more assets to share on Social medias.

Catch you all next time