Chapter 2: Early Development of Idle Power I

A week has passed, and his progress has considerably increased since he uploaded his first game on the internet. This was enough time for him to upload the update on his game.

“Well, I can’t really call it an update…” He sighed.

Version 0.0.1b only got two new options for the [Activity] menu and then one other option for the [Knowledge] menu. Their effects were so plain that any person would even wonder why the developer took a week just to add something so simple to the game.

But there was a reason for that.

The next update he was planning was actually making two more menus, which would introduce the concept of why the game was titled Idle Power. These tabs would be called [Power] and [Status], respectively. He planned for [Status] to be a tab that would progressively grow in numbers depending on the levels of the options from both [Activity] and [Knowledge]. As for [Power], he planned for it to be intricately connected to all three menus at once.

But there was a problem. Adding everything he was planning needed a lot of codes. Like a dictionary’s worth of codes just so he could even attempt to add that kind of function. Even if he succeeded, he would still need to test it thoroughly to know whether everything was working as intended or not.

Even though he had been improving every everyday due to the amount of potential profits he lost from the game, it doesn't necessarily shorten the amount of code he needed to write to implement what he was planning for this game. Normally, a developer would make a compromise and just stop reaching for that impossible feature, but for him, he didn't!

"I will definitely implement that on the next update!" He said as he clenched his fist.

In the duration of this week, he failed to implement both [Status] and [Power] because, frankly, that was a humongous task for a lone developer like him. He needed more time, so he had to be satisfied with this kind of update.

"It's a shame, but I have to be satisfied with this. This is fine; with the increase in features, I think the value of my game will increase. With the increase in the potential value of my game, the projected profits I can get from it will also increase. That means more improvement to my skills! "

Just like he said, his power doesn't just compare what he was doing to the average income of people who also profit from the same activity he was profiting from. It also factored in the quality of the product or end result of his actions that would result in him earning cash. Depending on the quality of his actions that could potentially earn him cash, the potency of the effects of his power increases because it is technically considered better quality as having more potential profits than a poor-quality one. This was why he originally planned to make a weekly update on his game.

But he was naive. Even with this power, what's impossible is impossible. He couldn't just make a weekly update and hope that he could finish what he was planning on the game next week with the features he was trying to implement on his game. That was pure arrogance on his part.

"Alright. I shouldn't be hasty and should do things slowly. I still have my savings. Even if I include my monthly bills and my food consumption and other necessities, I can still last for six months. I have more time to polish my game until it's complete enough to be uploaded on Woogle Play before my savings run out. I just have to be fast enough to implement everything I plan before releasing it on the Woogle Play platform."

Uploading his game to witch.io was just a way for him to accumulate losses from his potential gains from his game. He planned to at least gain enough money to sustain his life so he could continue making games on his own. In fact, his first plan was to upload his game to the Woogle Play platform but stopped himself because his game wasn't complete yet. Woogle Play doesn't accept applications that are incomplete. It at least needed to be complete enough before it passed their review. It would take him a long time to finish a proper idle game without any boost from his power, and he couldn't wait such a long time just for that. So he used witch.io as an alternative.

There was a way for him to potentially earn right now while still building up his game, and that was to set up an account on a crowdfunding site or a subscription-based site, which would allow any potential supporters of his games to donate to him. He didn't choose that because he wanted to maximize the effect of his power. He needed skills more than money right now, so posting it on witch.io was the right choice. At least for him, he felt like he made the right choice.

Anyway, with those thoughts in mind, he resumed typing on his keyboard. Before that, though, he wrote what he added on the update logs on the Idle Power page before he resumed his struggle of programming his game.

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"Ugh... it's still not working!"

A few days later, Mike was here throwing his arms out in frustration as he leaned his back on his cheap plastic chair. Displayed on the monitor of his computer was a prompt stating a crash, which forced the emulated game he was testing to close on itself. He immediately opened the source code and skimmed through thousands upon thousands of words, stopping at certain parts and then changing their values or a few parts of the code itself before running the game again.

When he got to the part where the error occurred, it got through, but at the next moment, the point counter above the screen got stuck with a lot of zeroes going beyond the border of that counter. He stared at it for a moment before sighing and closing the game to start another hour of debugging.

Now reaching the third week of development for this game, he has improved a lot. His skills were now comparable to an expert incremental game developer if it was only about programming features that inflate numbers on the screen. Even with that kind of skill, though, the features he was stubbornly trying to implement in his game were quite honestly ambitious.

'I can't move on to the combat system if this doesn't work out!' Those were his thoughts as he continued wrangling with the codes of his game and trying to force it to work.

What he wanted was for both the [Status] and [Power] features to be linked to the operation of the [Activity] and [Knowledge] features. The problem with that was that he was trying to put a lot of conditions and adding more special triggers just to make those features function. He's essentially cramming a lot of data that overwhelmed the process of the game system, and he also overlooked some overlaps to other triggers and conditions, causing the errors and crashes in his game. It was why he was having a hard time. It's incredibly different from the simplified idle game product he uploaded, which only has tabs for increasing point generation and another for increasing the max point capacity. He's essentially making a system that was akin to a status modifier that passively increased on its own. With it being linked with the operation of both [Knowledge] and [Activity], it was creating a feedback loop that just broke the game. As it was constantly doing this every second, it essentially overwhelmed the processes of the game system. This was just on the [Status] feature. The [Power] tab was an entirely different topic, as it automatically unlocked other modifiers on the game itself depending on the three previous tabs, which ultimately bloated the entire system, adding to the factor of why the game was such a mess to begin with.

If not for the improvement not just in his programming skills but also in his typing speed, he wouldn't be able to even finish half of it. Now he was just having a hard time optimizing every feature he made and fixing every error he could find. He even had to go to the internet and find some advanced tutorials because his programming skills don't include any knowledge that he hasn't implemented in the uploaded version on the internet. His power was that strict on its requirements that if he wanted to improve on a certain part, he had to deliberately include that action in the process of making the product.

"I swear, I will make this work before updating this game!" After drinking a cheap coffee he bought from his neighbor's shop, he leaned closer to the screen and started typing on his keyboard once more.

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Another day had passed...

"Tsk. Fine, Status is now working properly even with the delay. Now I just have to make the Power feature work..." Even as he grumbled like that, his hand was already moving, navigating the browser and going to the page of his game to update it.

He realized that he needed another improvement on his skills, and currently it was only giving him skill improvements for making simple idle game features instead of the more complicated ones. Now with the version 0.1.0 update, the skills to code such features would be added to the improvements of his skills.

"Well... no one has downloaded my game yet. There are only two who checked it but haven't clicked the download link for it." He checked and saw the view count, which became two. It happened a week ago, and since then, it hasn't changed.

He doesn't mind. The game was still in its infancy. Even if someone downloaded it, it wouldn't affect the potency of his power to himself because the game was basically free. He didn't put any price tags on the game at all. Maximizing the effects of his power was his plan at the start, after all.

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It's been a month since he started developing Idle Power. Due to the recent update he made last week, he became proficient in programming codes that followed multiple conditions and triggers in a certain feature of the game. This improvement helped him find the flaws within his codes, overhaul most of the junk data he discovered, and then replace it with more efficient and compact codes that made the game smoother and the experience much better tenfold.

Now, he finally managed to implement his intended function to his idle game, updating the game to its 0.1.1 version. He originally wanted to keep going and add the combat system he was planning for this game but postponed it due to one reason.

"This graphic is trash!"

That is right. He finds the graphics of this idle game atrocious!

He became so focused on just making everything work that the UI barely changed. It still had that singular diamond-shaped dot in the middle of the screen as the default background on the gray screen, the counter box for both point counter and point income, and then four rectangular tabs for the four features, which were obviously cropped from simple paint tool art. The fonts for the game were too small and without flair, and everything looked a bit too plain to be a game at all. The icon for each option on the [Activity] and [Knowledge], along with the icons for the unlockable modifiers on the [Power] tab, were all simple shapes or irregularly created scribbles that don't make sense. The sound design was also lacking. There was a lack of BGM, and the sound effect was only the 16-bit chiming noise that always played whenever he clicked on an upgrade on one of the options on the [Activity] and [Knowledge] tabs.

"That's right. I can't just market this game with such garbage visuals. I have to fix it!"

With that decision in mind, he started focusing on both graphics and sound design of the game.

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First of all, he downloaded a demo version of a professional art tool for digital artists and tried using it. He was already having a hard time even with the boost he got from his power because the tools themselves were entirely different from the default paint tool on his computer. He lamented just focusing on coding and ignoring the graphics and sound design of this game. His power, while it could enhance every skill he had used to earn cash or finish a product, would only distribute the improvements depending on how much he used certain skills. He barely put his time into illustrating the icons in the game, and the UI was just simple boxes he made on the paint tool, which was easy to make due to the tools there that could let him immediately make circles or square shapes in an instant. As for his sound design skills, he only used them once, and that's for adding that 16-bit chiming sound effect on each upgrade on the [Activity] and [Knowledge] options. He hasn't done anything else on the sound since then. Due to that, his power distributed most of his improvements to his typing speed, programming skills, and his ability to think on the limitations of his knowledge, making him quite skilled at making systems for incremental game systems, while his art was slightly better and his sound designs were still at the hobbyist level at best.

"It doesn't matter. I just have to do it!"

Even with how tedious it felt, he pumped himself up by thinking that, after this update, he would obtain the skills to draw skillfully. This was just right because in the future, he was planning to make anime-styled games. He couldn't do that if he sucked at digital arts. He had to bear with it and start putting his focus on the graphics of his game.

So for the following days, most of his time was spent moving his mouse and sometimes using his keyboard to use the shortcuts from the art tools that he learned progressively as time passed. It was hard. He messed up even with his hand becoming stable enough to draw straight lines without using the art tool for it. Most of the time he felt like the icon he made didn't make sense, so he deleted it and started over. Other times, he's just unsatisfied with the result that he made other icons just for it. Throughout all of this, he kept gradually improving until, after more than a week, he was done.

Now, instead of the small diamond-shaped dot in the middle of the gray screen, there was a still image of a simple white stickman in the middle of the screen with a bluish diamond-shaped dot in its face. The icons for each option on [Activity] and [Knowledge] now looked better and made sense from what they were referring to rather than just being random scribbles that didn't relate to the option they were put into. He even put a simple icon upgrade on the point counter and the point income. The point counter now had an icon of a capital letter P contained in a red square, while the point income had the same icon as the point counter, but the square was blue. In his spare time, when he fell into a slump, he had also made some optimizations to some of the codes to make the game much smoother than ever. This became the update that he wrote on the update log on version 0.1.2 of this game.

"Great. Now for the sound itself."

The sound effect was just something he got from a free stock library on the internet. He could just download different types of sound effects from that stock library and use them for his own game. Though now that he had the time and wasn't that worried about any hidden flaws in his game's codes, he downloaded a demo version of an app for different types of digital sounds. There were already a lot of presets saved on this app even with its demo version, and he could use it as soon as possible. For a whole day, he messed around with the sound library on this app. When the next day came, he put the sound effect data he felt appropriate on some parts of the game before saving it and then testing it. After an entire day of testing, on the same day that evening, he uploaded version 0.1.3 and wrote what he added. This version now has sound effects for clicking the tabs and unlocking modifiers on the [Power], and there is now a BGM in the game. The BGM was just a simple music he composed using 16-bit digital piano sounds, and he tried to make it slow and calm sounding so it doesn't disturb the game experience of the players. He had also added another tab that controlled the volume of both sound effects and BGM of the game. He was thinking about whether to add other features to that settings feature, though he wasn't that serious about it. His mind was set on one thing after all.

"Now that I made some improvements on that stuff, it is time to start making the combat system of this game!" He stretched his hand until he felt his fingers cracking and then leaned his head closer to the screen of his computer.

With the continuous success of his updates, his motivation was at an all-time high. He could feel that he was definitely improving, and with the updates he made, he was sure he would gain more improvements as time passed.

"Let's do this!" He said excitedly as his fingers moved through the keys of his keyboard.

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That enthusiasm was slowly curbed to the ground after a week.

"No... this is impossible..."

Mike looked as if his soul was leaving his body as he leaned his back on the chair. He thought that with the continuous improvements he was getting with his power, he would be able to do it, but he had underestimated putting the combat system he was planning onto his game. There was a reason for that.

It was because there were just a lot of things he wanted to do, all of which were out of the typical game design for an incremental idle game. The combat system was supposed to be a feature in the Idle Power game where the character of the player, which was the stickman in the middle of the gray screen, would be fighting against random mobs automatically around the screen while using what the player unlocked on the [Power] menu randomly. That was basically his entire reason why he wanted to make this game. He wanted to play a game where a player just flung whatever power they had at an endless amount of enemies. He felt like an idle game would be a great choice for it because the player didn't have to worry about micromanaging anything. They just had to unlock a power, and then their character would automatically use it. They were basically playing to unlock powers and see how they looked in the game. It might sound boring to others, but for him that was one of the most interesting things he had ever thought of.

He didn't think that implementing such a system would be an entirely different behemoth itself compared to his struggles with putting both the [Power] and [Status] systems in place. He didn't just have to program what the mobs were but also every single thing like damage output, resistance, different types of enemies, their status, the effects of each status, how they worked against each other, how each power worked on the game, and many, many more. It was a gargantuan task that would make even a team of game developers turn pale due to how much they needed to do just to make it work in the game. He was fast at typing, and he knew some efficient way to make an incremental idle game now, but the system he was trying to make was incredibly out of the usual idle game mechanic. He had to make an entirely new system for it, and while there were a lot of examples in the countless games floating around the internet, he couldn't actually copy them because they were very different from his own game concept. So he was grasping at straws, using some of the programming codes from RPG games he knew around, and going on a constant trial and error just for the system to work.

And it's been a week. He managed to finish a prototype for that kind of system, but it was littered with copious amounts of bugs that he was honestly regretting even trying to implement such a robust system for a simple idle game. It might be self-inflicted, but he was really close to giving up after realizing how much he had to do just to enact his dream idle game.

"..." He silently stood up before turning around and walking towards the wall where he could see himself in a mirror. He frowned at what he saw. "... I need a haircut..."

Realizing that he had been staying cooped up inside his home for an entire month, he finally decided to take a break.