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Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Final Level, Fixed Major Defects, and…Feature Complete?

In my last sprint report, I talked about adding Calls to Action in the menus and creating easier versions of the existing levels in Toy Factory Fixer.

In the past week, I finished the work of adding an easier version of the fourth level, added level previews to the level selection screen, and fixed a bunch of defects, including one really, really big, game-breaking one.

Sprint 50: Release criteria

Planned and Complete:

  • Create training level versions of existing 4th level
  • Level Selection previews level details
  • Defect: Dispenser bonus menu can show different amount than what player is rewarded with

Not Planned and Complete:

  • Defect: In-game options CTA seems to persist despite closing the options menu
  • Defect: Main menu CTA seems to persist on How To Play Screen even if it shouldn’t be there
  • Defect: Possible to click on dispenser button after “1 turn left”, meaning the next production run to start is the next-next one, skipping toys and preventing the game from ending

Planned and Incomplete:

  • Update Android targetSdkVersion to 30

As I said last time, with the Thanksgiving holiday, I wasn’t sure if I was going to find myself with a lot of time to work on the game or hardly any, and as it turned out, I ended up doing no game development after Wednesday.

Despite putting in less than four hours of game development, I managed to get quite a bit accomplished somehow.

I finished creating easy and challenging work shifts for the four levels, essentially doubling the game’s levels to a total of eight.

I realized partway through the previous sprint that I would love it if I had an indication of what each level involved when I was selecting it, so I added a preview on the right side:

Toy Factory Fixer - Level detail preview

Toy Factory Fixer - Level detail preview

Fixing the dispenser defect was more involved than I originally anticipated. Originally, I thought the issue was that if you opened the dispenser detail menu, it would tell you that you would earn 50 pigeon coins (or whatever the amount was), but when you actually started the production run early, you would instead earn less.

And that was AN issue, but it wasn’t the only one.

Basically, once a turn starts, it must end, but it was possible to be on this menu screen and not have it update with the new turn number (and associated pigeon coin bonus). So I made sure to update it at the appropriate time (which was more involved than it might seem).

But then I discovered that you could do something even more than merely miss out on some coins.

If you opened the menu when there was one turn left, but that turn ended, then technically, the production run has already started, but the menu will now update with the NEXT production run’s data even though you shouldn’t be able to get to this menu. So if you start the production run early, you actually skip one of the production runs.

And I was able to consistently skip multiple production runs, so it was easy to reproduce the issue. But when I got to the end of the game, the dispenser thinks it still has Bad Toys it hasn’t dispensed, but it would have no way to dispense them, so the game would never end.

So I had to prevent this defect by basically checking for this special case and closing the dispenser detail menu if you somehow managed to open it and can see it when you shouldn’t.

It’s probably the ugliest, most special-case code in the entire project.

Anyway, I then discovered that my new Call to Action buttons were showing up where they shouldn’t. Or rather, they didn’t show up but acted like they had. That is, it was possible for the buttons to appear and then not exactly go away, so even if you didn’t see them, you could still accidentally tap on them.

Whoops. So I fixed it both in the main menu and in the in-game options menu, mainly by writing code that essentially says “Only handle this button when these particular menus are active and ignore it otherwise.”

And then…I was done?

The game is done?

I mean, there are a lot of other features and updates I would love to do, but for v1.0, the game is basically ready to go.

Except I have worked on it for so long that I now need to make sure I don’t need to update any SDKs or libraries or built tools in order to package it up properly for both Google Play and the App Store, each of which has updated their requirements in the last year.

But assuming I don’t get stuck figuring that part out for too long, I just need to build, package, and upload the game to the stores, create the store pages, including any pictures or videos, then wait for their reviews to tell me what I need to fix…

Well, it is hard to say how much longer it will be, but I’m hoping you’ll be able to play the game before Christmas!

Thanks for reading!

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