Over at the GameMaker Community Forums, there’s an amusing thread where people confess to the worst code they’ve ever written. Since GameMaker is often used by newbies, it’s pretty common to see some hilarious WTF moments in code.
My favorite has been:
if fps < 60 { fps = 60; } //Fixes any performance problem!
If you’re not familiar with GameMaker, fps is a read-only variable that the engine updates to indicate the number of frames per second the engine is making. If it’s below room_speed (often 30 or 60), the game appears to stutter or lag. This happens when the hardware can’t keep up with the demands of the software…. so naturally the way to fix this to simply assert that fps is meeting target! ROFL!
I think that this code would actually compile and run without throwing errors in old GM. Despite being a read-only variable, GM would allow you to overwrite the value, not caring because the engine would simply re-calculate fps and update it again on the next step, and nothing adverse would happen. But if you were drawing fps to the screen, you would see “60” — even though the game might be lagging.
Here’s my own story:
When I was working on my game Alamogordo for Ludum Dare 29, I wanted to replicate the font used by the Atari 2600 in the game E.T.
I had not heard of sprite fonts before, and had never used them. So I improvised my own system. First, I fired up E.T. in an emulator and took screen captures of the score, taking care to get all 10 digits that I would need. I then cut out the numbers and put them into a sprite resource. As I recall, I had problems with the selection size not always being the same, or being exactly centered, so it took quite a bit of time just to get the sprite set up so that it was the right size for all digits, and all the digits were positioned the same relative to the sprite origin.Next, I wrote a script that took a number that I passed into it, converted that number into a string, then took each digit in the string and ran it through a switch statement, matching the value in the substring against a case that drew the right sub-image of my sprite that held the images of all the digits, and correctly offset them from one another, to draw the score on the screen. Only… no, I didn’t even do it like that! I actually used div to get the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands digit, and then used that value as the subimage index to draw the sprite.
It worked beautifully, and at the time I thought it was brilliantly clever, but that there had to be a better way if only I had the time to RTFM.
I was using the variable name “finds” for storing the score because the player’s score goes up whenever they uncover something as they dig through the Alamogordo landfill, finding it, and you got a certain amount of points for each find you discovered.
///Create Event: finds = 0; image_index = 0; image_speed = 0; ones_digit = 0; tens_digit = 0; hundreds_digit = 0; thousands_digit = 0; ///Draw Event: ones_digit = finds mod 10; tens_digit = finds div 10; hundreds_digit = finds div 100; thousands_digit = finds div 1000; draw_sprite(sprite_index, ones_digit, x, y); draw_sprite(sprite_index, tens_digit, x-sprite_width, y); draw_sprite(sprite_index, hundreds_digit, x-(2*sprite_width), y); draw_sprite(sprite_index, thousands_digit, x-(3*sprite_width), y);At the time, my inspiration for the game was very last minute, I hadn’t even intended to produce a project that weekend, but the idea came to me Sunday and I ended up putting the game together in literally about 10 hours altogether. So I was just pleased that it worked on the first try. I had literally no time to experiment or read through the manual in the hopes that I would find a proper way to do it!
Lol! I recall writing that code, running it, seeing that it worked, and saying “Right, then! Good enough!” and moving on to the next thing I had to do. It’s fantastic sometimes what you can crank out when you’re only concerned with finishing on time, and don’t care about things like correctness or maintainability.
Truth be told, this is probably not my worst code I’ve ever written, but it might be the worst code that I’ve written that actually did what it was supposed to do.
Epilogue: I later learned about and used a sprite font in my Ludum Dare 36 game, Ancient Technologies. It was a much nicer way to draw the score to the screen!