Week Nine

Hello hello everyone~~

I finished up the game I was talking about last week, though in the simulations I ran, the results appeared to be paying low at some times, high at others, and even exactly what I wanted occasionally. Usually this means the game is off, but after hours of trying to find something wrong, we just concluded that the game and its features are too volatile and the RNG (random number generator) of the game is not actually truly “random,” so the results won’t actually appear as they are in reality.

So as we’re coming up to the end of the SRP these last few weeks, I’m finally actually gonna start making my own game! While the process is pretty similar to what I’ve been doing before, now I get to come up with my own features and implement everything into the game myself, rather than just looking off a sheet with all the data already on it. I gotta say, it's actually pretty cool that I got this opportunity, although it’s a bit harder than I expected to come up with all the features on your own.

So far, my game is going to have a feature that occurs during the free games where you collect different symbols whenever they show up on the screen, and if you collect enough of one symbol you are awarded a pretty nice jackpot (though it’s probably not going to be very likely to actually happen). Since this game is starting from scratch, I have to do a lot more than usual just to add this one feature. Since this feature is affected by certain symbols showing up on the reels, I have to actually go and edit the reels and put in the symbols, meaning I also have to balance between having the symbols showing up enough times to look like you can collect enough for the bonus, while not messing up the pays you get from just the spins alone. That is about as far as I got this week, mostly because I spent way too long just trying to actually come up with the idea of the feature itself~~

Also, I’m still looking for more features for my game, so if you guys have any ideas you should totally comment them because honestly I have no idea what to do. Keep in mind the goal is to make the game unique from other games so people would actually wanna play this game instead of others~

See ya guys later :D

Week Eight

Another week of glorious coding over at Design Works Gaming!

For those of you following closely to my weekly posts, you probably remember me mentioning last week that I was starting to work on a game called Slingo. Well, there’s some news surrounding that, the main one being that I’m not going to be working on it, or at least not until later. We also learned that whenever we do work on the game, it would actually be implemented as a bonus feature of a standard game, rather than being it’s own unique slots type.

So, instead of working on Slingo, this week I spent most of the time working on yet another slots game. This game followed the same essential steps as the previous games, of course being even more complex than before. This game did have some interesting features though: The first new feature was this “buffer” that would basically go across the screen in a randomly chosen pattern, turning every slot that it passes into a wild symbol. The explanation for this is much much simpler than the actual coding of it though. There were very few games that have already been made that have a similar feature, and the ones that did have it had some weird niche components that changed how it worked, so I was basically left to create it without much help from previous games. It was definitely the part of the game that took up the most time, with a lot of frustrating, tiny details that created problems all over the place.

The second feature is a lot easier, as it was basically just giving you a second chance at getting free bonus spins if you got 2 out of 3 bonus symbols. However, even this simple respin feature has a few annoying interactions with the rest of the game: Since this feature, as well as most of the other ones in this game, changes what symbols on the reels, it is important to make sure to sequence these interactions in the code in the correct order so they don’t mess each other up. I’m actually working on figuring out exactly where to put everything, so that’s where I am now.

Sadly, still no more updates on the Facebook games; maybe we have done all there is to do on Facebook. Though I complained numerous times about this in the past, I’m still somewhat missing mindlessly spinning the slots, just not enough to do it on my own without being required to. On the bright side, now they have their own Facebook page that you can all actually check out right now: Diamond Sky Casino Community

Week Seven

Back at it again with the weekly blog post!

This week was a trip down memory lane: Rather than starting on coding more games, we went back and made some final changes to all the prior games we had been coding in the previous weeks, using all the tips and tricks that we’ve learned since we initially wrote the code. One of the main addition I needed to make to my games was to add something called a ‘mathobject’ to certain parts of the games that had a feature which would need to be used by the programmers to indicate something special is happening. It’s a little hard for me to explain mostly because I’m not entirely sure how it works myself, but basically it just shows where something needs to happen for the next people who work on the game after us. Some math objects had different coding than others, but they were all pretty similar so my main struggle was figuring where they were actually needed.

In other news, if you guys remember the construction I was talking about earlier, they've made some significant progress, and parts of our office have been remodeled! I gotta say, the new rooms look pretty cool with all the slots machines all over the place (I should probably take a picture but I can never remember until I start writing these blogs).

We’re also starting to come up with some ideas of how to code a new type of slots game. The example we’re looking at is called Slingo, which is basically a combination of slots and bingo. The concept is pretty cool, but coding it is actually pretty unique compared to the regular slots games. Since we haven’t coded one ourselves yet, we actually have some free space here to figure what the best way to go about it is, so I’ll probably post some updates on that next week.

I also checked the fake email I created to make the Facebook account where I was playing the the online casinos, and it turns out they spam you ALOT when you play the games as much as I did, so I’m very glad I used a fake email instead of my own. After reading a few of them, I honestly didn’t really understand why they felt the need to send so many spam mails, as they really didn't entice me to play the game any more than I already do, but maybe the technique works better on those older ladies, who knows~~

Anyways, that about wraps up my week for you guys, see ya again next week! :D