Devlog #4

I tried to add 2 features. They’re not done, but the message telling me that I need to post a devlog soon is giving me anxiety.

The two features I tried to add are a focus trainer and a timing trainer.

The focus trainer involves 8 rotating “keys” inspired by the Geometry Dash level LIMBO’s ending. You have to follow a key that’s randomly selected in the beginning as it moves and shuffles around. At the end, you have to identify the correct key. Right now, the keys are there and can be rotated and positioned, just not like actually moved.

The timing trainer involves clicking the mouse as soon as a circle touches a white line, and giving you points depending on how close you are to perfection. The circle is there, but it doesn’t move yet.

The problem is that I lowkey will not get the two things done within 2 hours, so yeah.

Devlog #3:

I added a trainer for alt spam and spamming with keyboard. For those who don’t know, in Geometry Dash, alt spam is when you click with two separate fingers on two separate hands usually, so that you can get twice the FPS. And in osu! it’s like when you click with 2 fingers to click faster I think I don’t really know that much about osu!.

I did spent some time trying to implement a typing speed test, but eventually just gave up and scrapped the idea altogether.

Devlog #2:

I added a reaction time test.

Note that the home page already existed previously, I just added the button that links to the reaction time page.

I don’t think the UI looks that good yet, I’m probably going to improve it if I can find a way to improve it.

Devlog #1:

I lowkey kinda suck at video games, so I made a skill trainer to get better. I can’t click fast enough, my aim sucks, and my reaction time is higher than… what I would like it to be (can’t thing of something good, sorry).

CPS Test

I can’t click that fast. There’s Hypixel bedwars sweats that can click at 30 CPS with one finger, and I can only click at 11CPS with two. I guess I could go on a testing website, but they have ads and I really needed to make something for Stardance.

Aim Trainer

My aim sucks. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, it took me 10 seconds to click a randomly teleporting circle 16 times. I mean I don’t think it’s that slow, but I can definitely be faster.

I’ll add more features later, but so far it’s only these two.

bro my mouse broke and i can’t even scroll lol

Devlog #1: C++ and SDL2 Basics and Stuff

So I’m making a game in C++. Without a game engine. As my first experience with C++. There’s no way this could go wrong, right?

I spent half an hour installing CLion because my laptop only has WiFi 4. Then, I opened CLion only to see an error message because the runtime was missing. I then spent 1 hour downloading the clion-jre package from the AUR, at literally 500kbps.

I then spent like 10 minutes watching the programming with Mosh C++ tutorial, but I know how to code. I know what variables are. I have experience. So I decided to jump right in into making the game window. And that’s what took me almost 3 hours.

There’s almost no good SDL2 tutorials on the internet, and if there are, I didn’t find them. Except for YouTube of course, everything is on YouTube. So until I finally decided to search it up on YouTube, I spent like 2 hours trying to get a window to appear. Lowkey I was copying code from websites, but the code didn’t work anyway so I don’t think it matters.

Finally, I went on YouTube and lowkey copied the code from the builder to finally make a window.

All of that for a black screen and a single pixel of white. Great.

Devlog #11: Probably final devlog before ship

The project is now released on Itch.io! There’s files for Linux, MacOS, and Windows since compatibility is important. I personally daily drive Linux, but I know that most people use Mac or Windows.

If I get 5 likes on this post I might release this for iOS and Android (depends on if it costs money to release idk)

Yes, it did take me 3 hours to package the files and put them on GitHub and Itch.io. Yes, I also used AI a lot for it, but in my defense this is my first time doing anything like this.

There were also a couple of issues with the assets locations, and I also had to use AI but overall I think AI only takes up maybe 2-3% of this project.

Devlog #10:

The bot is finally fixed. Now it (almost) never misses tactics, and it plays about 10 times faster thanks to better scanning.

So essentially what I did was for every empty spot on the board, it scans for a specified pattern. If a pattern is found, it returns the coordinates, which are then placed. If somehow there are no patterns, the bot either tries to get 2 in a row or plays randomly.

the screenshot is me losing to my own creation. probably because i lowkey have a skill issue

Devlog #9

I added a volume toggle to the main menu. IDK if I mentioned this, but I added background music to the game. It gets annoying listening to the same 3 songs for so long, so I made a 2 buttons with Inkscape and coded it so that they toggle between each other depending on if the background music is turned on or turned off.

I decided to switch from Visual Studio Code to PyCharm, and was then assaulted by like 50 warnings about how everything I did went against some kind of Python convention or another. It took me like an hour, but I managed to get all the errors sorted out.

The bot is still broken, IDK why :(

Devlog #8

Some relatively small changes like README improvements and adding the ability for the game to handle draws. Believe it or not, it’s actually possible to get a draw by filling up the entire board, but it isn’t easy (see image below).

I also removed the bot’s AI because it was really unoptimized and inefficient, and I am now in the process of rebuilding the bot’s AI from scratch.

Devlog #7

The bot can now create threats and and will try to win. It’s still kinda dumb imo, but I’m a relatively skilled player so yeah.

I was thinking of maybe using an engine someone else had built to power the bot but I couldn’t find anything.

The bot still misses tactics from me like 50% of the time and idk how to make it better.

Devlog #2

I added some more content, about Minecraft and coding. I also finished with the README..

Devlog #1:

I’m making a website themed after a stereotypical hacker because I think it looks cool. Right now I have 2 content boxes and some ASCII art, which I think looks decently cool.

Devlog #6

I added intelligence to the bot. It’s not that smart yet, but it now actively can try to thwart your plans by blocking you when you have 3 or 4 in a row, and will also try to get 5 in a row.

I did this by searching for 3 and 4 in a row using a modified version of the function that scans for the game conclusion (5 in a row).

To help evaluate the position, I created a separate copy of the board, then simulated placing stones on every spot and seeing if there’s a 4 or 5 in a row now.

For a while, if there was already a 3 or 4 in a row on the board, the engine would just think that the first available spot was a good spot, which is not good. I solved this by getting the function to return the position where the 4 or 5 in a row is located.

The bot has yet to beat me in a game where I took it seriously, but hopefully that changes soon.

Devlog #5

I made singlepayer vs bot (finally). Only problem, the bot players with the skill of a blind and deaf 2 year old, which is too say, completely randomly.

I will proceed to stall the creation of an somewhat competent engine for this for like 3 weeks.

Devlog #4: Optimizations and StartPositions

As the title implies, I optimized the code and tried to fix what is called “spaghetti code”. I guess I was somewhat successful but I won’t know until I start trying to implement singleplayer with the bot.

One thing about this project that I haven’t implemented yet is the actual swap2 balancing. Except that actually implementing swap2 turns out to be very hard, so I decided to use my own balancing method instead, by just picking a random starting position with 3 stones on the board. Is this the best? No. But does it work better than the pro method? Probably idk.

#Devlog #3

I added a main menu to the game. It doesn’t look good or anything, and I had to make the buttons in GIMP because I was too lazy to draw the buttons on Pygame.

From the main menu, you can quit the game, play offline multiplayer, and there’s also buttons for settings and singleplayer, which don’t do anything except stop you from clicking any buttons.

After someone wins in offline multiplayer, a line gets drawn (like in tic-tac-toe), and you exit back to the main menu. For a long time, it was broken and after you exited, you weren’t able to start another game, but that was because of a bug with resetting the board.

Devlog #2

So you can now actually play the game. It only took me 8 hours.

What I added

Placing stones

The most basic gameplay mechanic of Gomuku and Go. When you click on a place you can place a stone (in Gomuku and Go it’s where the lines intersect), a stone appears according which player’s turn it currently is.

Winning

When you get 5 in a row, you win. The game window closes instantly, which isn’t really good, but I couldn’t find a way to display a gameover message (at least not yet)

Struggles

Misalignment

For a long time, the rendering script was somehow broken and stones would display in the incorrect location. I solved it by manually moving the stones 45 pixels up and left.

Gameover detection

This took me so long. For the longest time, it seemed like the code was just not running. Then I asked AI because I literally did not know what to do, then the program just crashed on start. Then I asked AI again and it works now. Apparently it was because I used break and return prematurely, which lead to most of the squares not being detected.

#Devlog #1
My family is from China, and so as I grew up I played a lot of Asian board games. One of those was Gomuku, or Wuziqi. So I decided to make it in Python, with a bit of a twist.

Most of the gomuku websites on the internet, and even my family, when we played it, use the Pro ruleset. In this ruleset, the player that starts first (black) has literally a 100% chance of winning in a perfect game, and a 67% chance of winning in actual competitive play. This is of course, unfair, so the highest level tournaments instead use the swap2 ruleset (hence the swap2 in the project name), which balances things out. TBH I don’t really understand it much but I’ll figure it out.

So this session, I just made a game board in Pygame. This should not have taken me 3 hours, but I don’t have any experience in Pygame beforehand, and also I tried to code the code for placing the stones before the code to actually rendering the game. I had to delete the code since it was very confusing when writing the code to draw the board.