Year-end fixes

We all need motivation to make those small changes, the ones that we love to have done but we don't actually like to do. That was sort of the case with Now We're clickin', Team. There were a few bugs I saw right away and was able to fix, but they didn't feel release-worthy. Then time dragged on, and there was one or two more to fix, but I never did. Then the Short Games Showcase came up, and this felt perfect, not necessarily to win or get close, but to say--yeah, I meant to finish those features I started.

In a way, there's really not much at all. I looked at my GitHub repository, which is private right now, but it shows that I added two town names and two new directions. Then I also split up arrays so you couldn't start with certain university base names.

The big thing was probably giving the player more flexibility about how to start. You could restart before, which wasn't too much of a problem, but it got kind of tedious. Here, what happens is, you can choose to go to a different town entirely, or choose a different base name from university. What happens is, the one you currently have gets kicked to the very back of the long array, and the next university base is chosen quasi-randomly. Element 0 in the array is most likely, then 1, then so forth. For an array of size 36, 0 has a 36/(36*37/2) chance of being chosen, 1 has 35/(36*37/2), and so forth.

I was pleased to get this implemented, on the last day before the camp closed, and then I realized, what if people actually liked the name, but they wanted to see about different universities in the area? This seemed pretty horrible, until I realized I just had to define another function, at which point I also realized, what if you got the same university name again? I'm pleased with the Capote I wrote for that, where you will go from, say, Hopeless Hills to New Hopeless Hills.

Oh. There were some under the hood changes. You should always lose to the very rare indeed opponents from Schultzston. If you win the championship, you can't click through. You have to hunt the link. so you can't skip it.

There's also more retrospective at the end, depending on the championships you won. There, I'm pleased with the small gadget I put in place to detect cheating. It's possible to use twins undo to play until you defeat a certain rival, although of course you may want to be smart about things and not do so with a very low seed. But the game kind of taps you lightly on the shoulder and mentions that there's something funny going on here if you win, say, seven or more championships. I ran the odds on this, and that's really unlikely without cheating.

All these changes on their own soon that trivial count when I put them together, I'm actually pretty pleased with what I feel is a significant body of work. I mean, the game was only 350 words to begin with, so changes do have more relative impact.

Sometimes you do some work, and you know it's not super profound, but you're glad you sat down and did it, and you realized there were a few more moving parts than you thought, or maybe because you put it aside for a while, you forgot a bunch of them. It was rewarding for me to sit down and pick out what I've done from the GitHub history. I'm glad I had it there. There are no mind-blowing changes here. But I fixed a bunch of things I meant to, ones that seemed potentially intimidating but fell once I had a clear mind and motivation (one last thing to do before 2023 ended, at 7 PM on December 31st.)