TDEMO Week 3: Incremental Style Game

For Week 3 of TDEMO we were asked to create an incremental-style game (think idle like Cookie Clicker) in randomized groups. This would make testing code a lot harder than usual because we would have to send the code we had written to the person with the actual build of the game in order to test it, which would delay the process. It was doubly inconvenient for me because as of the time of writing this devlog, I am not in the same timezone as the rest of my group.

We decided to split the work up into sections for each of us and I chose to work on the code for the clicking and auto-clicker upgrades. This way, I could just make a build on my laptop and not have to send it to someone else to test my code.

The code itself was fairly repetitive as the majority of the coding was to do with the upgrades for the autoclickers. Perhaps in hindsight I could have streamlined the code to be a bit more efficient as most of it was repeated with minor changes for each upgrade. However, with the experience of the previous TDEMO project I found this one much quicker to get the hang of, especially since I didn't have to handle any parts of the art or background.

Overall I feel I managed my time much better than the previous project, especially since we were told to try and limit the amount of time spent on the project to around 7 hours (my estimate of how many hours I spent would be around 8-9).

Below are some snippets of code used as part of the project.

 public GameObject fakeButton;
    public GameObject realButton;
    public GameObject fakeText;
    public GameObject realText;
    public double currentGames;
    public static double CPValue = 3000;
    public static bool turnOffButton = false;
    public GameObject CPStats;
    public static int numOfCP;
    public static int gamePerSec;

    void Update()
    {
        currentGames = GlobalGames.GameCount;
        CPStats.GetComponent<Text>().text = "Copy+Paste: " + numOfCP + " @ " + gamePerSec + " per sec";
        fakeText.GetComponent<Text>().text = "Buy C+P - " + math.round(CPValue) + " games";
        realText.GetComponent<Text>().text = "Buy C+P - " + math.round(CPValue) + " games";

        if (currentGames >= 2000)
        {
            fakeButton.SetActive(true);
        }

        if (currentGames >= CPValue)
        {
            fakeButton.SetActive(false);
            realButton.SetActive(true);
        }

        if (turnOffButton == true)
        {
            realButton.SetActive(false);
            fakeButton.SetActive(true);
            turnOffButton = false;
        }
        if (numOfCP != 0)
        {
            CPStats.SetActive(true);
        }
    }

The game uses 2 sets of buttons for each buyable upgrade - this lets me change the visual look of an item when it is available for purchase by deactivating the "fake" button and enabling the real button with a different color to show that the player has enough to buy that upgrade.

After looking at some of the feedback on the project the main 2 concerns were that a specific upgrade button didn't work and game broke if you turned it fullscreen. I'm still not sure why the button doesn't work considering its a mirror image of the other 2 similar upgrades (coffee and sleep), but I know that the fullscreen issue is to do with the Unity displaying the game in a specific length and width, and all the buttons are anchored to said location. Then, when the user makes the game fullscreen, the sprites for the buttons are moved out of place, while the buttons remain in the original position.