Week Four

Hello again everyone! A lot went on this past week, including me finishing my second game, starting on the third, and also going back and fine tuning the first game as well as adding a few things. First off, the second game was, at least on the surface, much more complicated than the first. While the first game only had two features (free spins and a bonus wheel), this game had 4: free games, bonus credits, credits multiplier, and bonus wilds. The main difficulty of the two additional features was figuring out how to code the feature that actually changed what symbols appeared on the reels. The bonus wilds basically changed a random number of spots to a wild symbol to increase your chances of winning, but I haven't had experience with that before. After searching for examples of this in other games and numerous questions to my supervisor, I finally found a way to code this feature into the game. Hooray!

As for the third game that I also started, one of the features actually brings up a sort of mini game, so that will be fun to start figuring out next week. I mentioned going back to the first game and making some edits; this was mostly done by my supervisor, as he has much more experience and found many areas in my code that could be adjusted to make the whole process much more efficient, though we were expected to be able to do this ourselves in the future. Hopefully as I see him make these edits I can use the new code to help with future games with similar aspects. Another edit we had to make was actually fixing the comments found within the code. For those who don't have much experience with coding, when writing code the programmer will often make small comments that are indicated by double slashes “//” and help anyone else reading the code to decipher what is going on and what each line is trying to accomplish. We were basically tasked to make sure all the necessary comments were written in the code, so if anyone wanted to go back and change something later, it would be easy to figure out where the change should be made. The last of the edits we made was something called a “gaff list,” which basically creates a menu setting for developers to be able to test all of the features of the game. When you activate whatever feature you want from the gaff list, it sets the game so that the next spin will be guaranteed to land on the corresponding symbols that trigger the feature, so the features can be tested without having to spin countless times to get it to trigger naturally in the game.

As far as the studying Facebook games go, Max and I finished gathering the data from the most popular casino apps and put them all on a spreadsheet to compare them. Funny story with that: after we finished gathering the data, we were compiling them into one list so they could all easily be accessed at once. I figured it would be easier if I just put my excel file onto the server so Max could copy it onto his computer rather than having to retype everything. Sadly, I made the mistake of deleting the file on the server rather than copying it (sounds stupid I know, but this was after several hours of mindless spinning so I wasn't in the most aware state of mind). Normally, you would be able to access your recently deleted files in your recycling/trash bin on your computer, but since this file was saved on the server rather than on my desktop, it wasn't added to the bin and presumably was just lost forever, so we had to go back and do a few of the games again.

Anyways, that was my week for you, see ya next week ~~