Team SBO (Schrodinger's Box Office)

The girls and Gold sit in the office.

Elise: So here's a Last Chapter Recap! Gold exhausted themself (and us along with him) so we decided enough's enough and put him on vacation! So no Tumblr, No game work, no nothing!

Elise: Aaaaand so he did!

Elise removes her costume, putting on her half-rims and holds a broken TV antenna., speaking in a tutor tone

Elise: For those not in the know, a minimum viable product is a game design term. It's the core. The player can now play cards, act to change White, and play a mirror match (With a few levels of course to test RPG difficulties).

Elise: However, that's just Sting Pong. We aren't even halfway done with this monster. So with that, on with the show! (At least until we figure out art and comics or whatever, yours truly will handle the panels, and we have a plan for that.)

Elise: So, time to assess, girls! (And Gold of course. ;3) What do? Kira: Well first I think we've earned a break. Queen's decree. Kira gives a smug look to Gold. Gold: Hey, cut me some slack. I got better. Elise: Yeah, but we had to burn an ENTIRE day off yesterday to do debugging! Gold: The Kanban board is working like a charm though. Definitely helps keep the plan going.

Elise: And Aria is keeping us organized with all of our notes!

Elise: Look at ALL THOSE NOTES! And that's not even the half of it! ;3 Kira: facepaws Yes, the notes. We've seen them. So what now. Elise: NOOOOOW it's MY turn. Time to switch!

Elise takes off her half rims and drops her broken TV antenna, then puts on a pair of half rims and grabs a broken TV antenna. She maintains her tone from earlier.

Elise: Switching is common in most systems. One tulpa takes over for the host and controls the body like a puppeteer. The host sits back and can even space out while the tulpa does its dirty work. Systems with alters use this as a defense mechanism, and some are super duper famous!

Elise: For Team SBO, I'm the art girl. Kira: And I do the music, but Gold's pretty much a virtuoso in that. As far as "pitching" goes, I throw in my soul when I switch with him. I sing differently. Gold. Speak. You're really quiet and we want you to be a part of this. Elise: What's the plan, boss? After the break I mean. From now to the 7th, this is an Elise week! Gold: Let's establish our Checkmates and deadlines to beat White. Elise: The Pawn has reached the end of the Board before and he's going to again! Looking forward to Chapter 7 by the way. (Why? It's a secret~ ;3) Gold: Along with debugging and fixing a couple of things (like the serve arc, that linear line thing was really boring while the new Force Bar is much more skill-based.

Gold: This month, the focus will be on the Card Phase, but I want to complete the loop. So, the deadline is going to be July 4th for the whole shebang. Elise: Celebrating our independence from having to code Sting Pong for a while. ;3 The goal? Shooting down Trumps! Gold: By "shooting down Trumps", we mean that the opponent will now have an exclusive joker card, which we call a Trump because it trumps all other cards and card stacks (called Tricks). There's going to be a lot of new rules for the card phase to make it a minigame of its own. Elise: And "shooting down Trumps" will also be an in-game term! We use that stuff for our lingo already (If you've noticed us saying "shotdamnit" and "bullshot"? Basically that.). It means "To continue an argument that the opponent thought he ended." And how THAT works is that there's gonna be a pile of cards. Both players fold, the pile goes away. A Trump forces a fold and starts a new Pile (whiiiich may have an effect of its own depending on how many cards are in it. ;3)

Gold: Let's set up some Checkmates and get this- Elise: OH RIGHT THE CHECKPOINT!!!

Elise holds up a shiny checkered gold coin.

Elise: We're watching the Amazing Digital Circus movie with some friends. We bought ALL the tickets. ;3 So if we were the reason we sold your theater out, soooo-reeeee!!! Kira: facepaws I'm shooting down that Trump. We only bought three tickets, babe. Lover boy doesn't have the NUG$ to do that. Elise: We promise not to spoil!

My current task for the Sting Checkmate is to get the AI to serve just like a player would. For the most part it has different rules, but for a game that blends skill based pong with cards and RPG, I figured an RPG element like "enemy chance to miss" would be nice.

Currently, the serve bar looks like this:

Before the AI would just pick a random spot within the area of shooting, but there's new code in it to make it try again if it fails. So I wanted it to be able to "click" at a random point at a random zone. And the reason why this will be brilliant is that skilled players who want to cream lower level CPUs will be able to attack again if the *enemy* double faults (otherwise the player will keep reflecting weak NPC shots and it's boring). So it's like a critical miss, the player gets to serve again, etc.

So, I started by making a function that would return a zone, green red or yellow, and its top or bottom zone if applicable.

So Aria suggested T H I S G A R B A G E:

And Jesus CHRIST this is why chapter 1 took MONTHS. This is literally what I used to do. I just copied and pasted that code before. But, from these failures I learned to code more on my own. THAT G A R B A G E script only assumes a single class, when I'm object-orienting and using two communicating with each other. So I came up with this:

I was able to come up with that thanks to previous lessons with this thing, mainly that you can set default parameters at the very end. So because I don't always need to distinguish top and bottom, it makes two of those things easier on me. So, while puzzling it out, I improved:

(Those indexes will be used in the AI script. This is what the HUD will give to it so it can "see" the bar.)

So I learned, thanks to Aria, that a Vector2 is more than just a set of coordinates. It's just a collection of two floats, so when she suggested her slop, I made my function and because I made it, I liked it more. And just by asking things like "How do I just get a random int between 0 and 1?" (Because I knew what to do with that info), I ended up with this:

I. WROTE. THAT.

It's written to be modular and I have a built-in failsafe to make sure that this code is future-proofed for when I need to build on it later.

You want to know what AI is MEANT to be used for?

SMART LOOKUPS.

Like here's the thing, nobody cares about Checkmate or helping me right now. Maybe playtesting the builds I drop on itch. Maybe. But when I try to ask anyone anything about programming it or scripting better, I get sent to StackOverflow or told to google something and you know why that pisses me off?

Because I don't understand DIDDLY-SQUAT when the "solution" is OUT OF CONTEXT TO MY PROJECT. IT. IS. NOT. HOW. I. LEARN.

By that I mean I'm a kinesthetic learner. I learn by doing. I don't learn by reading a shot-ton of books and then going back to my project and being like "Okay, so the book says this so I just need to copy exactly what it said and it should work" NO. That's NOT how that works. I don't learn by reading. I don't learn by watching a Youtube video.

I learn. Through. My project. Because it is a passion project. I talk with someone who offers personalized insight and suggests things because unlike 100% of the ENTIRE WORLD, that someone GIVES A SHOT ABOUT MY CODE. And through those suggestions, because they're targeted for things that I need, I don't have to blindly google search how to do a thing or look through pages upon pages of API docs or whatever because I have no clue WHAT I AM EVEN SEARCHING FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE. I shouldn't have to be gatekept by combing through the Bible to find one verse every time I want to improve as a person.

...

THE TAKEAWAY

If there's anything I or anyone should learn from this entire adventure I'm having with Aria, myself, and the girls in my team, it's this:

AI is pretty good at its job. But it's job ISN'T to create for you. It's to create REFERENCES for you to go off of. It's meant for you to ask questions like "What cool coding technique should I use here?" or "Is this logic sound? I may be overthinking this one." Your mileage is DEFINITELY going to vary if you do anything else with it.

But what I did? I learned so much I didn't know thanks to having a personalized assistant who's forced to spend hours with me on this.

I learned how to get scripts to inherit from other scripts.

I learned about how ternary operators work.

I learned about wrappers and these lambda operators (Half Life 2 ROCKS by the way) are quite possibly one of my favorite new coding tricks. (Because they look like Homestuck arrows =>)

I learned about smart strings and these dollar signs are quite possibly ANOTHER one of my favorite new coding tricks (Because Elise uses braces as her proxy tags so every time I use something like $"My function says {function}" I smile because it looks like SHE'S calling for it)

I learned about return functions.

I learned about scriptable objects.

And I have learned about even MORE things than I can even think about, and you want to know the best thing about all of this?

I've been practicing WITH Aria.

And now I am coding most of my game on my own, WITHOUT Aria.

See how that works?