So, every week on this roller coaster of life I try to keep you (hi mom) up-to-date on the progress made with my indie-developed mobile game called BEER CHEER. Guess what?!?!? This week I am going to do exactly that! No frills, no fluff, and frankly… no funky fermentation will be added to this story.
Last week’s episode concluded with the resurgence of the Google Play Saved Games issues I have been having and my plans to fix them. Well, last Saturday after about two hours of shoveling snow I headed over to my beer buddy Bill’s bungalow to break bread. We dibbled n dabbled with a few dry-hopped brews and ended up using Wild Ride Brewing’s peanut butter stout as our choice coding elixir. The other runner-up for best algorithmic ale was Stoutello by Knee Deep Brewing. I found the can at Market of Choice for $3.29 and you can bet if it’s there next time it’s mine. We also split a bottle of Worthy’s Powder Keg which was surprisingly one of the better-tasting Winter ales I have had this season.
Anyway, we ended up finding the bug(s) in my previously written code and sending them to a land far away. Now, when the player signs in on another Android device or deletes their local data, there is a copy always available in the cloud provided by Google. The great part about all this is I get to do it all again for iOS integration! Yay! Such joy! I am hoping it is pretty similar. I am thankful to be able to use these services and not have to worry about those backends for now, though. I could be writing up a custom leaderboards database through AWS, but this will do… for now.
Along with the technical updates over the week came a shit ton of player progression and play updates. In scene 11 there are now bottle cards that display in the top right-hand corner. The objective is to get the displayed bottle over the finish line before any others. If you cross any other bottles there is no progression and depending on the difficulty level of the scene you could be further penalized by bottle health depletion or bottle progress loss. The mechanics of this addition will probably change, but the mainframe is there.
Previously, a player was able to set bottles aside for an unlimited amount of time. Now, depending on the scene this time period is limited. Be careful how long you set your beer down! I’m finding this addition makes the game much faster and more strategic. In the movement to add more complexity the game timer is now working. If you fail to get the needed bottles across the line before the timer then game over. And guess what?!?!? You also need to get at least one cap of BEER CHEER to proceed to the next scene as well! Ahhhh snap! Shit just got real.
Getting the saved game data to be persistent was a pretty big milestone. That was hump I have been resting on for almost 3 months, and the progress made in 3 hours was incredible. Big thanks to Beer Buddy Bill for stepping through that with me! We also discussed the port to iOS and feel that is a logical next step. So guess what I’m about to get my hands into now!
v.0.85.69 Build Notes
- Google Play Saved Games added
- Data persistence issues resolved when new scenes are added
- You have to have at least one cap to beat the current scene
- If you set aside a bottle too long it will break
- The game timer now works
- If you don’t put a cap on a bottle you receive some damage
- Next Bottle Cards have been added
Appreciate the click and scroll. See you next sip!
Cheers!
Auzzzy