One hundred lines of code for your beloved

I could read her poetry. I could book a table in the restaurant, arrange a candlelit dinner: good wine, a helpful waiter, decent people around. Gently touch her hand and whisper:
- Beloved ...


But when a colleague came up to me and said:
- Look what I coded for my woman. ...
I realized that this is love. This is forever.
I want it too.

Clone


In the mobile application, the girl was asked to choose from two joint photos the one that was shot earlier.
The calculation was simple:

  • Girls love to remember happy moments together;
  • Girls love it when we remember all the dates;
  • Girls love surprises.

The game definitely hit the target audience, and as a professional game designer, it was obvious to me that this idea needed to be tipped. But before it was worth assessing the risks.
My questionHis answerMy thoughts
How long has it taken?Five hours at night.Excellent! Sit one night.
What did you code on?Unity3D.I have 12 years in Game Maker.
I can handle it even faster!
She liked it?What, you were delighted!
I didn’t think that this was possible.
She and her Androyd on "You."
He does not play games.
Only sms writes and VKontakte sits.
F * ck Yeah!

The last answer dispelled all doubts: the game was worth the candle, even as it was! Remained technical nuances.
Tap on the photo displayed text directly on top of it. If the right photo is chosen, praise and memories. If the girl did not guess, the text is in the spirit: “Honey, don't you remember?” And, again, pleasant memories. No negative. Replayability (after all, what is said about other pictures is interesting). Intuitive interface.
Only twenty photos. Two on the screen. Pressed - the selected photo is scaled and flies down. The second photo disappears immediately. Two more appear. Etc.

In the end, when the best moments of life are selected, the photographs soar up to the very center of the stage to turn over there, like tablets, making up the main words:


“Stop, how did you make the coup?”
- Just change the scale of the X-card.
- Fuf ... Relieved.

First blood


I took up the gift on the first gloomy night. Pretended to have urgent work.
An infernal breakthrough of animation was waiting for me. But since a colleague could, and I can. I remember he connected the LeanTween library for Unity3D . I decided to answer this with TweenGMS in GameMaker: Studio .

Here I, a miserable epigone, was waiting for the first catch: I had never animated through this library before. She connected easily, but it took some time to study the nuances. That same night, for some reason, I remembered that the colleague’s application automatically adapted to any screen sizes.

My girlfriend has an iPhone and an iPad mini, which means that by all means I need to adjust the game to all resolutions in general. You ask where is the logic? Three nights. I am leaving for the jungle of scaling, I sit on the anchor hook, become attached to DPI. It’s time to get jealous. It’s getting light ... The first mistake of Tony Wendis.

Real detective


By working day, may the team forgive me, I tried to realize what went wrong, repented to the programmer, told about the plans. He blessed my clone and set the right path.

The next night was no longer a joke: the girl suspected something was amiss. The weekend was approaching, but I desperately did not have time. It turned out that picking up twenty photos in three years of our life together is not so simple: they are scattered not only in folders, but also in devices. It's even harder to find out which one was filmed before. EXIF data is whistling frantically. “And the lamp does not light, and the calendars lie ...” I have to restore the course of events on her Instagram: I find posts in the same locations, write out dates, and check. Done. I'm McConaughey, damn it, I'm True Detective .


Weekends. Hiding a surprise is becoming more dangerous. The girl glances at me, indignant. An urgent need to solve something. I decide that you can’t just take and add photos, you need to make a design so that each picture is polarized. I’m looking for Polaroid templates for Photoshop, downloading a plug-in for reading PSD in Paint.NET , updating Paint.NET. Goodnight, my Love!

In white slippers, a shuffling cavalry gait preventing my beloved from sleeping, late in the night of the third day of development I went into the kitchen with a laptop: in a hurry to make photo captions. I would like to add that “the sunset was burning out on the gallery with a Chinese fan”, but the nerves were burning out, and the deadlines burned to the ground when I finally finished the last line of code, launched the application on my android FNF iFive mini with the iPad mini screen and ...10 out of 10, Lord! 10 out of 10!


Good night and good luck


A little remains: to quietly install the application on its iPad. VMware , it's your time. Virtual poppy swears on certificates. The iPad is in her bag, the bag is next to the bed. Night. Dark. I'm trying to get it, my fingers are trembling, my heart is about to pop out of my chest, she winced, I froze, she turned to the other side. iPad in my hands! I am building an application and getting down.

In the morning when she is going to work, I give her the iPad and proudly announce that here he is - her surprise. In order to somehow justify myself, I add that it was over him that I pored the last two days and three nights. Cute heart icon:


The application starts. Our song sounds. Now cards will fly out, so beautiful, just like us. Now ... Now ... Can I show on my tablet?

Before dawn

His questionMy answerMy thoughts
How long has it taken?Two days and three nights.Never again!
What did you code on?Game Maker: Studio.Never.
She liked it?She looked and thanked.Never…
In two days I’ll hear her say to her sister:

- Where did they go? Nowhere ... He spent the whole weekend at the computer, did not communicate with me. What did you give? Well, he made me a game ...

Our relationship is getting tighter. I do not want to think about this gift anymore.
After a week, having rewritten part of the code, I will find out why the game worked on Android and did not work on iOS (TweenGMS did not have time to initialize).

And I’ll open the main reason for the failure of the clone: ​​the original was created based on the capabilities. My colleague correctly estimated the terms, because I saw in my head not the result and reaction, but the process from and to. All photos were on the phone and easily sorted by date. He used LeanTween many times. Unity UI automatically adapts the picture to any resolution. The girl has an Android phone. He remembered that time was short, and did not go in cycles in design. She knew that he was a programmer, but did not know that he could. He did not spend their joint time on development. They are often chosen together somewhere, and this gift was something fundamentally new. Uniqueness, moment, marketing, audience. All this, of course, I did not take into account.

And then it dawned on me! This is the development of games, just like in the industry. You play clash of clans, you read about three months for a prototype, you count someone else's revenue, and it seems that the clone is the best idea. After a year of development, when the release moment is missed, you realize that you spent a lot of time and money, and everything had to be different.

When I finally threw the working version on the girl’s iPad, she gave me a tired, understanding, affectionate look:

- I liked it ... True. So nice that you remember everything!

Tomorrow is March 8th . I will no longer take into account. The poem is written. The table is reserved. I don’t know what I’ll give her, but I know for sure: we will sleep together tonight, in each other’s hands, where the tablets used to be.

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