Dev Diary // Using ChatGPT to make an Idle Clicker Game

There is an idle clicker game called Cookie Clicker. It's amazing, you click a giant cookie, to make more cookies, to buy buildings and upgrades that will make cookies. There is a grandma apocalypse, a dragon called krumblor and ascensions. Kittens can give you milk multipliers which boosts your cookies per second. The entire goal is to make as many cookies as possible per second. It is utterly addictive and completely free:

Cookie Clicker

Cookie Clicker was first released back in 2013 and I started playing around 2015. Soon after release, the creator made a website: Idle Game Maker, which turned the cookie clicker code into an engine and allowed users to make their own idle game. It's really intuitive and easy to use; and you can host your game for free using their website.

Whilst messing around with that engine recently; I realised a lot is hidden away from the user. Being an engine programmer, I wanted to know more about how clicker games actually function but I have next to no knowledge of web development; enter ChatGPT.

The above video is me sitting down with Chat and trying to get it to create the bare bones of an idle clicker with as little coding from me as possible and I'm amazed at the results. I filmed for 50 minutes and by the end of that I had a clicker game with 2 buildings and a lucky button that appears randomly. I edited about 3 lines of code in total but used ChatGPT to generate everything for me. Even asking it to move CSS elements to different places.

I don't think I would continue trying to get it to create the entire game as that would get a bit tedious; but now I've got the bare bones, I've got a solid starting point to tinker with. I would probably start making it look prettier first before adding anything else.

HTML, CSS and Javascript are completely outside my zone of knowledge but having looked through the generated code; the html and JS is actually pretty readable and easy to add to. The CSS on the other hand will require some more thought.

You can find all the code generated in this session here:

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/ChatGPT/tree/main/BiscuitClicker

Chapter 26 // Exercise 4 - Principles & Practice Using C++

In this exercise I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and a modified version of the std_lib_facilities header found here.

Chapter 26 // Exercise 4

Devise a format for test data so that you can define a sequence once and run several tests against it.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/principles-practice/tree/master/Chapter%2026/Exercise%204

I honestly did not understand what he meant by this at first. I guessed that we had defined the test sequence

{ testName value { sequence } testResult }

and so he wants us to be able to define any test sequence like:

{ testName { sequence } value testResult } 

or even

{ testName } { value } { sequence } { testResult }

So in this case I decided to make an enum that held each part of the sequence:

Then, the user could just create a vector<TestSequences> and pass through whatever sequence type they want like:

I then made the functions into a class that held the sequence type, so it could check it whilst using operator>>. I then used a switch statement to define what to do for each part of sequence.

All you have to do then is create a TestSequence, give it a type, set the sequence type and then load in the text file.

It does rely on there being spaces though. Without the spaces, the entire line will be read in however, I imagine that that would be a major "you must do this when writing tests" line in the documentation for creating tests.

Chapter 26 // Exercise 3 - Principles & Practice Using C++

In this exercise I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and a modified version of the std_lib_facilities header found here.

Chapter 26 // Exercise 3

Repeat exercise 1 with the version of binary_search that takes a comparison criterion. Make a list of new opportunities for errors introduced by that extra argument.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/principles-practice/tree/master/Chapter%2026/Exercise%203

I continued using the code from exercise 2 and created a new testAll function called testAllWithPredicate. This takes in the input stream and a function pointer. I then modified testType to take in function pointer and used some std library comparison functions found in <functional>:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/functional

Chapter 26 // Exercise 2 - Principles & Practice Using C++

In this exercise I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and a modified version of the std_lib_facilities header found here.

Chapter 26 // Exercise 2

Modify the testing of binary_search to deal with arbitrary element types. Then test it with string sequences and floating-point sequences.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/principles-practice/tree/master/Chapter%2026/Exercise%202

I decided on the rule that you can't have tests that included wildly different types like string and floats. Binary search requires that your elements are sorted, if one element is "cheese" and the other "3.4", how do you sort that?

I then tried to do it so the the same file could read in string tests, followed by int tests or floats. But doing compile time checks on what type the stringstream was reading into became a bit long winded, so I just created 3 seperate text files and fed them into the code.

Then it was just a matter of slightly modifying operator>> overload so it could handle any type. I did this by just reading everything into a string. If it hit '}', I put that character back into the stream then converted the string into the necessary type via istringstream.