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Evaluation

I used a lot of unreal engine and photoshop this project but mainly unreal engine. In unreal engine I focused on widgets and I learnt a fair bit about them. The main thing I learnt about widgets is how to use appends, before this project I didn’t know they were a thing or how to use them but I do now and they’re really helpful. In past projects I’ve wanted to do something that would work with appends but I didn’t know they were a thing so I didn’t do them. I used the unreal engine forum to find out how to use appends as I wanted to have 2 digits on my clock like this 04 but I didn’t know how I would put the 0 in front so I googled it and the forum came up. The main problems I had was when I was making the laser guided mousile and the resolution scaling. With the laser guided mousile I couldn’t figure out how to make widgets animations for a good while as I thought it had changed a fair bit since UE4 as I hadn’t tried to make any but the way you make them hadn’t changed it’s just where it is and I couldn’t find it but in the end I found it and it was just a button at the bottom of the screen I didn’t think to press that said animations. The resolution scaling was something that I never figured out how to fix I found things that would help but not fix it I think if I had done the things I found that helped at the beginning of the project and had made it with all of them already on it would have been fine but by the time I had found them I couldn’t restart the project as I had already nearly finished. I think I did quite well on this project I got a lot more done than I thought and I met the brief quite well I would and I think the game looks quite good. To meet the brief I made a clicker game that can be used on a touch screen. I also put the game on itch.io so that people can get my game off of the internet. Next time I need to do more blog work and do it when I’m making the game I think I have an okay amount of blogs but more research blogs at the beginning would be good and blogging as I go would be better as well as I could explain things better. I think with the game I could have made things better by not limiting things like upgrades so the player could get as many of the same upgrades as they want instead of a limited amount. I think more upgrades like the cat pilot and laser designator would have been good as well with more visual things the USB is good but could be better I could have made a small monitor that had the screen flash to make it more visual. Really I just need more time to do all of these things, I could do more work at home to give myself that time next project to make sure it’s as good as it can be I definitely need to do more blog work and that can be done at home to give myself more time when I’m in college.

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Gameplay screenshots

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Itch.io

I put my game on itch.io so that people can download it from the internet the page isn’t anything special it just has a couple of images and the name but you can download the game.

https://davy-crockett.itch.io/clicker-game

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Making the laser guided mousiles work

Widget animations haven’t changed they just changed where you make the widget animations so I managed to make the laser guided mousile and I think it’s quite good. I didn’t need all of the mousile designs I made I only needed one of them so I chose the one that I thought looked best but I did need the mouse that hits the button. To make the buttons work I made it so that if you click the cat button it will check if you have bought it already if you have it wont do anything but if you haven’t it will check if you have 50,000 clicks and if you have then it will set has bought cat pilot to true and take away 50,000 clicks. To fire the mosuile you need to buy the laser designator to make that work I check if you’ve bought the cat pilot if you have it then checks if the animation is already playing if it isn’t it then checks if you have 100,000 if you do it will play the animation and then take away 100,000 and will then wait 0.5 seconds as that’s when the mouse hits the button and will then add 200,000. I think 200,000 is too much as you can continually buy it and still make a fairly large profit but I think I’m going to keep it as it’s something for the player to do.  

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Laser guided mousiles

Sam spoke to me yesterday and said about having two upgrades that work together like a cat and a fish or laser pointer and having the fish/laser pointer go on the button and have the cat hit the button and give the player loads of points which lead to this. I thought that if I was to do it I’d want to use the laser pointer but I thought that would be a bit boring and he said something along the lines of silly things working better in these sort of games so instead I decided to try and make a laser guided mousile which is a mouse missile that is shot from a cats plane to a laser designated target. In game I think I could make this with widget animations I think they’ve changed a lot in UE 5 so I don’t know how I’d make them but I’m sure I can figure it out. My plan is to have a laser designator upgrade and a feline pilot or cat pilot or something like that upgrade and once you’ve bought the cat pilot you can buy the designator and that will cause a red laser to slowly point towards the button and then have a mouse with a rocket on its back fly towards the button and hit it. I have no idea if that’s actually possible but I want to try and make it because I think it would be hilarious. I started to design some cat pilots and I made quite a few different versions to see which one I liked best realistically I made way more than I needed but it was quite fun. The first design I made was similar to the leather hat and goggles second world war pilots wore which I felt looked quite right for the insanity of mouse missiles but because the other upgrade was a laser designator I didn’t think it worked as well as a modern fighter pilots helmet would. I went through a lot of different modern fighter pilot helmets before I found one I liked the first two still looked like cats but the helmets didn’t look right I thought it might have been the goggles so I made them less dark and gave them an outline which I thought looked better but sill not as good as I wanted it. I decided to add the oxygen mask and see if that looked better and I thought it looked a lot better especially with the tube on the side but I started to think it didn’t look like a cat very much anymore. To fix that I thought I could add a paw on the helmet as a sort of roundel but I had to make its head a lot longer and I didn’t like the look of it so I tried to add different markings on its face near the oxygen mask and I settled on the second one of them designs as I thought it looked the best. I made more designs after that because I still wasn’t happy with it, I decided to add a mouth on the oxygen mask but I didn’t think it looked very good so I went back to the other designs and that’s when I decided that the second one with markings was the best. 

After that I had to make the laser designator I only made one design for that as I was happy with the first one the only issues I had was trying to figure out how to make the lenses look good I don’t think they look great but they work.

The only thing left I had  to make was the mouse missile I was pleasantly surprised as to how well it went I made quite a few designs but that was just so that I can make it look like it’s flying by having it’s tail, legs and the flame from the rocket move. My plan is to have all of the diagonal ones be the ones that are flying towards the button and then when it hits the button it changes to the vertical one and have it stay on the button for a couple of seconds and then slowly slide of the button and down the screen.

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Feedback

Sam looked at my game and was talking about different ideas I could add all of them were making my game have more visual upgrades. One of the upgrade ideas I thought was quite a good idea it was a cat and a fish or laser pointer that would go over the button and make the cat paw the button to give you a lot of points. Another one Sam said about was having a trail of ants walking across the screen and pacing a piece of food or something near that button that would make the ants change course and walk over the button to give you points. I think I’m going to try and add the cat one but with my own twist as I think it would be the easiest and most realistic given how little time I have left.

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clock

In cookie clicker there’s a bit where it tells you how long you’ve been playing for so I decided to add one for my game as well as I didn’t think it would take me too long. To make it I made a delay that goes off every second which will add a second to the second variable and when that gets to 60 it will add one to the minute variable and set the seconds to 0. Hours and Days work the same way as minutes and seconds so if you get 60 minutes you get 1 hour if you get 24 hours then you get 1 day. An issue I ran into was not being able to name the variables properly I’m not sure why but it would let me name seconds properly but minutes, hours and days I had to name bigger seconds, bigger minutes and bigger hours because it wouldn’t let me name them properly for some reason I think it might have been because I called the functions that set the text their names but I’m not sure. 

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USBs

I wanted to make another thing similar to the clickers for the auto click software and I thought of adding USBs on the side of the button which I think works quite well but it doesn’t do anything interesting like the clickers I thought about adding a flashing light on the USB but I didn’t know how to do it. They work exactly the same as the clickers code wise but because there’s less of them it was less copay and paste.

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Achievements

Cookie clicker and clicker heroes both have achievements so I thought I should add some as well I don’t have as many but I have a few and it’s mainly just so I know I could do it and could add as many as I wanted in the future if I kept making it. It wasn’t very hard to make the achievements all I had to do was check if I had made a certain amount of clicks or pretiged or had gotten a certain amount of clicks in total and then changed the background colour of a button from whit to grey. I also made it so that none of the buttons could be clicked and if you hover over them then it wont change anything. I put the button in the top right hand corner underneath the cheat button if I didn’t have the cheat button then I would have the achievement button there but I need that there so I can test things with some speed. To close the widget I put an X button at the top of the screen the works the same as the achievements button in the regular widget but the other way round.

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Sentient button

The sentient button is near on identical to the regular button the only differences are that it looks different and when you click it, it has an angry face. I decided to make the sentient button so that there was a big purchase for the player to save up for you don’t need it to prestige and it won't disappear when you do either. I thought it would be quite funny to put no refunds on the button where you buy it because it’s completely useless and costs a lot of clicks. The only difference in code is that I have to hide the regular button and unhide the sentient button when you buy it other than that it’s identical. I thought I could change the image of the regular button to the sentient button instead of having two different buttons but I couldn’t find anything that would let me do that I’m sure there must be a way of doing it but I don’t know how so I just made two buttons. 

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Prestige

I wanted the prestige to start you from the begging but with some extra help so it’s actually worth doing I decided on making it so that you get an extra 10 clicks per click when you start so instead of the 1 click when you start if you’ve prestiged twice you’ll get 20 and so on. To make that I made it so that when you try and prestige it will check if you’ve bought all of the upgrades and if you have it will add one to prestige amount and add ten to prestige multiplier. After that I had to set pretty much all of my variables to their default condition to reset the game which makes for a very long line of code. After all of that I then set the regular click multiplier to what ever the prestige click multiplier is.

I decided to have some golden cursors appear underneath the prestige button so you can see how many times you have prestiged it works the same way as the auto clickers it just doesn’t flash to make it look like it’s clicking. I probably should have made the other way of doing it I spoke about when I made the auto clicker as I had to copy and paste the code 20 times and even then there isn’t a cap for how many times you can prestige so eventually you’ll just stop getting clickers but keep prestigeing. 

Making the tool tip or this was a bit different as I wanted it to display how many upgrades you’ve bought, how many you need and how many times you’ve prestiged already I also wanted to make it so that when you can prestige it will tell you. To do that I made a check to see if you have bought all the upgrades if you have it would go to a return node that says you can prestige if you haven’t it would got to a return node with an append in it. To make the append say what I want I had to add all of the upgrade amounts together and put that in an append with the text I want.

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Auto clicker hands

I made the auto clicker hands but I probably didn’t do it in the best way. Because I only needed a specific amount of hands instead of having them spawn I just have them hidden in the widget which makes for a fairly long line of code that’s very repetitive. If I had any more than 10 it would have been worth figuring out how to just make them spawn at the location I need them to I don’t think that would have been too hard but I already knew that this would work and wouldn’t take too long as it’s just a copy and paste job. 

I wanted to have the hands flash between it’s regular colour and a greyed out version to make it look like it was clicking every second so I had something that checks if you’ve bought the right amount of auto clickers and if you have it will set the background colour from white to a grey colour every second to make it look like it’s clicking.

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S.W.O.T

Strengths 

I enjoy doing widget related things and this project I’m going to make the game entirely out of widgets so I’m most likely going to enjoy this project more than the others. I’m also quite good at making widget related things as well so I should make something pretty good.

weaknesses 

I haven’t done too much with widgets before so I may not be able to do everything I want or I might be a lot slower making what I want than I normally am.

opportunities

I can learn a lot about widgets and what you can and can’t do in them and how they work.

threats  

I’m very easily distracted and might end up procrastinating a lot or I could end up focusing on making my game too much and neglecting my blog. 

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M.o.S.C.o.W

Must have 

A button that you can press to increase some sort of points

At least one upgrade that makes getting pints easier

Should have

More than one upgrade

An auto clicker

At least one visual upgrade

Could have

A theme 

Multiple visual upgrades 

Animated visual upgrade/upgrades

Would have

Better button for clicking e.g. the enemies in clicker heroes 

More in depth upgrades 

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New button designs

I made 4 different new button designs in photoshop so I had a couple of button designs and could chose which one I liked the best. The bottom left design is the first one I made and I decided to make the button red as there’s the trope of people needing to press the big red button to find out what it does and I decided on the black and yellow stripes to mimic caution tape to increase the curiosity of what the button does. When I was designing it someone walked past me and said about how he thought it would be funny if after all of the upgrades have been bought it pans up to a window and everywhere had been nuked which I was quite pleased with as that’s the sort of thinking I wanted people to be doing when they saw the big red button and caution tape like background. I also thought that was a quite good idea and thought about doing something like that but I couldn’t really think of a way to do it so I’ve left it to the players imagination to decide what the button does. The three other designs as based off of the first design the top left and bottom right going hand in hand as they both have covers the only difference is one is open and the other is closed. With the top left and bottom right design I had an idea about having to press the button to open the cover to be able to press the button and if you haven’t clicked it in a while then the cover closes but I decided against it because I didn’t know where I would put the number of clicks you have and it would take up a lot of space. I decided on the top right design as I think it looks the best and has a place to put the amount of clicks you have I decided to put a little screen on top of the basic button design that I wanted to look like a digital clocks display. Whilst I was making it I thought about making a USB stick to put in the side of the button for the auto click software similarly to the auto clicks cursors. 

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Other upgrades

I made so more upgrades that are all basically just auto clickers except from the first one. The weight I chose because I thought it could be something that you put on the button to hold it down so it would automatically click so if I was to put something on the screen when you buy it, it would be a weight on the button. the next one is the auto clicker software which isn’t to far off of just calling it auto clicker 2 or 3 but I couldn’t really think of much else. The weight and auto clicker software work the exact same as the auto clicker it they just cost more and you can buy different amounts you can buy 5 weights and 8 auto clickers. The first upgrade is a click upgrade so it will increase how many points you get for each click by one so if by default I get one point per click if I get the upgrade twice I will now get three points per click this also effects how many points you get per tick any of the auto clickers go off by so instead of getting one point a second when you get the first auto clicker it will give you three if you have the click upgrade twice and so on. I limited the click upgrade as well so that eventually if I add a prestige you have to buy all of them as well at the moment it’s limited to 100 upgrades. The code is fairly similar to the auto clickers but instead of changing a delays time it changes the click multiplier.

I’m quite happy with the auto click and auto click software images but I don’t think the weight fits in very well and the click upgrade I think might confuse people and they might think that’s an auto clicker so I want to change both of them.

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Auto clicker

To make the auto clicker I have a delay that will always go off but wont do anything unless the has bought auto click boolean is true if it is it will then add what ever the click multiplier is every second unless the change delay variable is less than 1. To upgrade the auto clicker I just need to make the change delay less so it seems that the auto click is clicking faster. Because there’s a point where the delay wont go any faster than it already is I’ve set a limit to how many auto clicker upgrades you can buy for this one it’s 10.

When you click the button to buy the upgrade it first checks if you’ve got the max amount of auto clickers if you have then it wont do anything but if you don’t then it will check if you have the same or more clicks than how ever much it cost for the auto click. Once its done that if you have enough it will check if the change delay variable is less than or equal to 0.2 because if it is you can only take away another 0.05 before it reaches the max speed the delay can go. if you haven’t got less than or equal to 0.2 it will set that you have bought the auto clicker to true and will then take away the cost of the auto clicker from your clicks.

Next it needs to set the cost of the auto clicker to be more than it was last time it does that by adding what it was last time by whatever the multiplier is and the multiplier will go up by a certain amount every time it’s bought the same way the cost does.

Once it’s done that it needs to take away the delay change so the auto clicker will actually go faster to do that it minuses the delay change by 0.1 or 0.5 depending on if the delay change is 0.2 or more.

And after that it will add one to the bought auto clicker variable so I know how many auto clickers I’ve bought and can display how many more the play can buy.

There are only two differences between the two rows that it can go down depending on if you have 0.2 delay change or not. The differences are that the first one will set has bought auto clicker to true but the second sets max auto clicker to true instead and the other difference is the amount of delay change that is taken away.

The button for the auto clicker has two mouse cursors as eventually I’d like to add mouse cursors around the button that look like they’re clicking. I also changed the font to a more pixel art style to fit in with the style of the cursors.

To display the amount you need to buy the auto clicker I added a text box to the button like I did with the button but instead of just displaying the text I made it so that if the max auto click is true it wont display anything to help the player understand that they can not upgrade it anymore.

I also wanted it so that the auto clickers button would go a darker grey if you couldn’t afford it or had got the maximum upgrades so to do that I checked if the amount of clicks I had were greater than or equal to the amount it costs and if it is then it would set the background colour to white but if it isn’t it would set it to a dark grey so it looks greyed out.

Can’t afford

Can afford

Max upgrades

To make it as obvious as possible to the player that they can’t buy the auto clicker more than 10 times I added a tool tip that will say Auto clicker and then the amount you’ve bought out of 10 so you know 10 is the limit and how many more you can buy I also made it so that if you’ve bought the max amount then instead it will display Maximum upgrade so you know why you can’t buy it.