I haven't written about my escapades for a while. It's a difficult thing to write about currently. I have so many projects I am working on that I find it hard to distinguish between the two, which makes it hard for me to write coherently about. Mainly because, in the back of my mind, I am always thinking “Is that the right one I'm on about?”
Currently I am working on an idle clicker incremental game for the website. It won't be particularly groundbreaking, it'll do what it says on the tin. What it will have is the standard level of piss taking you'd expect from a Foul Entertainment product and a sense of fucking humour. I really get fed up when these games take themselves so damn serious. Let's get one thing straight; They're not proper games. You can't lose. You can progress slower, but you can't lose. There is no real challenge, it doesn't take brains or awesome reactions. It doesn't take anything. So, hopefully our slant on it will be worth the massive waste of your time these things are.
The best thing about making this 'game' is that has tested me. It has forced me to go way outside of my comfort zone. For starters, before starting this game, I had no idea how to save progress in Unity. This game saves your progress, and I coded that. In Unity, there is a built in update function that is called every frame. Whether your computer has enough processor speed to run at 10 fps or 110 fps. I wanted to make something happen, every second, using the update function. But with the massive disparity that is possible with the end users computers, I had no idea what to do. The game does something every second, no matter what the speed of your computer and, once again, I coded that.
Image Credit: gamefaqs.com
Pictured: How it felt when I coded it.
I had to learn a lot of new things. I hadn't used the new user interface system before this game. Now, I can knock up prototype user interfaces within an hour depending on what is needed.
Pie a'la code
The biggest issue I had when I first started was that after I had done about 20% (still only at 35%) I had to pretty much start again. I had used a singleton. Now, there is a long winded and very informative description for a singleton, but I am gonna just go with how I used it. I used a manager script for the upgrades. This didn't give any major errors when playing the game. Each upgrade worked fine independently. It wasn't until I implemented saving and loading that the massive problem became apparent. Due to using said singleton, every time it loaded up the game on start up, it went all drug addict and started sharing. Specifically the values of variables.
Image Credit: wearebaked.com
"Ay man, this shit'll get you variably fucked up."
See, because the singleton saved and loaded the different values (number of upgrades bought, current cost, etc.) once, whichever one was saved last, all upgrades loaded up that number next time you played. It was my own fault and it taught me a lesson, namely 'never share'. You lose half of your shit, other people get the benefit of your work and you catch AIDS.
Tobacco Code
There is nothing more frustrating than stupid shit like that happening. It genuinely crushed me. I had to turn in for the night. Not before I had spent six hours on a different computer viciously disembowelling a Unity project in front of what remained of the idle increment game. I had to let it know I wasn't to be fucked with. Let's just say that there is a platformer demo underneath a patio somewhere in the Midlands.
Image Credit: gratefultothedead.wordpress.com
It don't matter if you're inanimate, you don't fuck with The Cunt.
In the end though it was worth it, since I learned not to make that stupid fuck up again, I also learned around about 17 different ways to creatively call my computer a cunt. The final thing I learned? That family tree websites do not have records of computer families, so threatening to fuck their mothers in front of them, has little to no effect.
By The Cunt
Email The Cunt
A hidden face of the crew, The Cunt is main coder for Foul Entertainment games. He is currently documenting the progress of our game, Foul Fantasy, in his dev blogs.
Email The Cunt
A hidden face of the crew, The Cunt is main coder for Foul Entertainment games. He is currently documenting the progress of our game, Foul Fantasy, in his dev blogs.