I recently created a Twitter bot that tweets one randomly generated metaphor every two minutes.

I’ve decided to make the source code available. Get the source on Github here. Read the README.md, as it requires installing some software and getting your own API keys.

The whole thing is pretty simple and hacky. The program is pure JavaScript, running in node.js, which lets you run server-side JavaScript totally distinct from a web browser. I host the bot over at Nodejitsu — you can actually see the app “running” here: http://metaphor.jit.su/ (Nodejitsu requires all its apps to respond to HTTP requests, so I have Express, a very simple web server, running just so the hosting service doesn’t mess things up.)

The program uses the Wordnik API, which is a fantastic service that lets you specify things like “give me 4 random nouns, and now give me words commonly used in phrases with those nouns.” I don’t really use any of the fancy stuff; I just ask for random nouns and adjectives within a certain tolerance of common use (I’ve calibrated it so that the words can get pretty weird, but not so weird that the sentence is incomprehensible). What the bot does is call the Wordnik REST API using Chris Williams’ super-simple restclient, which returns a JSON object with my words that I add to a very simple string. The algorithm is:

(a/an) noun (is/considers/of) (a/an) noun: adjective (and / , not / , yet / but / , / , but not) adjective

That’s it. I play around with frequencies a bit, where “is” is much more likely to show up than “considers” or “of”.

When it chooses articles it can be buggy. I don’t check for phonemes (though you can do it with Wordnik), so sometimes you’ll get “an university” or “a hour,” things like that.

Weirdly, the Wordnik API needs to be coaxed to just give me regular nouns or adjectives. For example, to get singular nouns I had to ask for it to include nouns, but explicitly exclude proper nouns, plural nouns, proper plural nouns, possessive proper nouns, suffixes, family names, idioms, and affixes. Adjectives I didn’t filter so much as it seemed to mostly work, but I still get weird words that don’t seem to fit, like “generall” (archaic adjective), cist (a noun), youngling (archaic noun). But I also get wonderful conversational words like “lovey-dovey,” “sky-high,” and “Smithsonian.” So… I’m pretty happy with the results.

Finally, I have the program tweeting on a setInterval using the twit npm package, which is the simplest JavaScript Twitter API interface I was able to find. It works exactly as advertised.

The only other interesting thing the bot does from a programming perspective is that every five hours, it grabs the last 20 retweets of its own tweets and favorites them. The result is that you can see a best-of list right here.

Here’s another Spelunky modding tutorial I posted over on the Mossmouth Forums. This shows how you might add a third inventory element to the game, something that behaves like a bomb or a rope in terms of always having a limited number of it in your inventory. This can even be modified slightly to provide you with something like an ammo count.

Overview

So let’s say you want to add a new inventory item to Spelunky — something like bombs and ropes, but different. For the sake of this tutorial, let’s have you be able to hold up to 99 rocks in your pockets. We’ll make it so that rocks behave kind of like bombs: if you run across one, you can pick it up and it is added to your inventory when you switch away from it.

What we’re going to do in this mod is: set the appropriate global variable, figure out how to switch to the new inventory item, and set up the new HUD element so we know how many rocks we have.

Setting the Global Variable

The amount of bombs and ropes you have are stored as global variables. The game sets them in the scrClearGlobals. This script is run at the beginning of every game, and it sets every global to false/0, except for bombs, ropes, and plife (player life), which all get set to 4. So in scrClearGlobals you want to make the following change at line 109:

else
{
    global.plife = 4;
    global.bombs = 4;
    global.rope = 4;
    // ADD THIS LINE (we're starting the player out with 1 rock)
    global.rocks = 1;
}

Switching to Our Rocks

Here’s where we change the code so that pressing the “switch item” button will put a rock in our hands if we have more than 0 rocks. We also want to put in some code so that when we have the rock equipped, our global.rocks is reduced by 1 (so it works the same way bombs and ropes do).

Let’s look at the code from oPlayer1 Step, in the second Action Block, line 952:

else if (inGame and kItemPressed and not whipping)
{
    // switch items
    if (holdItem)
    {

// If we're holding a bomb and it's armed, we can't switch away.

        if (holdItem.sprite_index == sBombArmed)
        {
            // do nothing
        }

// If we're holding a bomb and it's not armed, then put it back in your
// inventory (increment the global), and then destroy it so you're not
// holding it anymore. Then, if there's more than 0 ropes, switch to
// ropes. Otherwise, switch to what you're holding (or nothing if
// you're not holding anything.)

        else if (holdItem.sprite_index == sBomb)
        {
            with holdItem
            {
                global.bombs += 1;
                instance_destroy();
            }

            if (global.rope > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rope -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
            else
            {
                scrHoldItem(pickupItemType);
            }
        }

// If we're holding a rope then put it back in your inventory
// (increment the global), and then destroy it so you're not
// holding it anymore. Then switch to what you're holding
// (or nothing if you're not holding anything.)

        else if (holdItem.sprite_index == sRopeEnd)
        {
            with holdItem
            {
                global.rope += 1;
                instance_destroy();
            }            

            scrHoldItem(pickupItemType);
        }

// If we're holding an item that's not heavy (damsel or Idol)
// and we have a bomb or a rope, then store it away as
// pickupItemType for later. If we have bombs, switch
// to bombs, if not, then switch to ropes.

        else if (not holdItem.heavy and holdItem.cost == 0)
        {
            if (global.bombs > 0 or global.rope > 0)
            {
                pickupItemType = holdItem.type;
                if (holdItem.type == "Bow" and bowArmed)
                {
                    scrFireBow();
                }
                with holdItem
                {
                    breakPieces = false;
                    instance_destroy();
                }
            }

            if (global.bombs > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oBomb);
                if (global.hasStickyBombs) holdItem.sticky = true;
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.bombs -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
            else if (global.rope > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rope -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
        }
    }
// If you're not holding anything, switch to bombs if available.
// Otherwise switch to ropes if available.
    else
    {
        if (global.bombs > 0)
        {
            holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oBomb);
            if (global.hasStickyBombs) holdItem.sticky = true;
            holdItem.held = true;
            global.bombs -= 1;
            whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
        }
        else if (global.rope > 0)
        {
            holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
            holdItem.held = true;
            global.rope -= 1;
            whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
        }
    }
}

It’s a little complex so you should read through my comments there. Basically, we take this structure and extend it so we have the logic for switching to rock. It’s a good exercise to read through this code and figure out why I made the changes I did:

else if (inGame and kItemPressed and not whipping)
{
    // switch items
    if (holdItem)
    {
        if (holdItem.sprite_index == sBombArmed)
        {
            // do nothing
        }
        else if (holdItem.sprite_index == sBomb)
        {
            with holdItem
            {
                global.bombs += 1;
                instance_destroy();
            }

            if (global.rope > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rope -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
            else
            {
                scrHoldItem(pickupItemType);
            }
        }
        else if (holdItem.sprite_index == sRopeEnd)
        {
            with holdItem
            {
                global.rope += 1;
                instance_destroy();
            }

            if (global.rocks > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRock);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rocks -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }

            else
            {
                scrHoldItem(pickupItemType);
            }
        }
        else if (holdItem.sprite_index == sRock)
        {

//           global.plife = 0;

            with holdItem
            {
                global.rocks += 1;
                instance_destroy();
            }

            if (pickupItemType == "Rock") pickupItemType = "";
            scrHoldItem(pickupItemType);
        }

        else if (not holdItem.heavy and holdItem.cost == 0)
        {
            if (global.bombs > 0 or global.rope > 0 or global.rocks > 0)
            {
                pickupItemType = holdItem.type;
                if (holdItem.type == "Bow" and bowArmed)
                {
                    scrFireBow();
                }
                with holdItem
                {
                    breakPieces = false;
                    instance_destroy();
                }
            }

            if (global.bombs > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oBomb);
                if (global.hasStickyBombs) holdItem.sticky = true;
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.bombs -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
            else if (global.rope > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rope -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
            else if (global.rocks > 0)
            {
                holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRock);
                holdItem.held = true;
                global.rocks -= 1;
                whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
            }
        }
    }
    else
    {
        if (global.bombs > 0)
        {
            holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oBomb);
            if (global.hasStickyBombs) holdItem.sticky = true;
            holdItem.held = true;
            global.bombs -= 1;
            whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
        }
        else if (global.rope > 0)
        {
            holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRopeThrow);
            holdItem.held = true;
            global.rope -= 1;
            whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
        }
        else if (global.rocks > 0)
        {
            holdItem = instance_create(x, y, oRock);
            holdItem.held = true;
            global.rocks -= 1;
            whoaTimer = whoaTimerMax;
        }
    }
}

Adding Rocks to the UI

Next we want to add a new UI element to the top of the screen that shows how many rocks we have. To do this, open up scrDrawHUD and you’ll see this:

if (global.drawHUD and instance_exists(oPlayer1))
{
    lifeX = 8;
    bombX = 64;
    ropeX = 120;
    moneyX = 176;
    draw_set_font(global.myFont);
    draw_set_color(c_white);
    draw_sprite(sHeart, -1, lifeX, 8);
    life = global.plife;
    if (life < 0) life = 0;
    draw_text(lifeX+16, 8, life);
    if (global.hasStickyBombs) draw_sprite(sStickyBombIcon, -1, bombX, 8);
    else draw_sprite(sBombIcon, -1, bombX, 8);
    draw_text(bombX+16, 8, global.bombs);
    draw_sprite(sRopeIcon, -1, ropeX, 8);
    draw_text(ropeX+16, 8, global.rope);
    draw_sprite(sDollarSign, -1, moneyX, 8);
    draw_text(moneyX+16, 8, global.money);

What you’ll want to do is create rockX, which is the X offset of the new rock UI element. I would put it in between rope and money, because money is variable length so you want it at the far right hand side. Then you just add the draw_text() and draw_sprite() functions. I used the sprite for the rock in the example below:

if (global.drawHUD and instance_exists(oPlayer1))
{
    lifeX = 8;
    bombX = 64;
    ropeX = 120;
    rockX = 176;
    moneyX = 232;
    draw_set_font(global.myFont);
    draw_set_color(c_white);
    draw_sprite(sHeart, -1, lifeX, 8);
    life = global.plife;
    if (life < 0) life = 0;
    draw_text(lifeX+16, 8, life);
    if (global.hasStickyBombs) draw_sprite(sStickyBombIcon, -1, bombX, 8);
    else draw_sprite(sBombIcon, -1, bombX, 8);
    draw_text(bombX+16, 8, global.bombs);
    draw_sprite(sRopeIcon, -1, ropeX, 8);
    draw_text(ropeX+16, 8, global.rope);
    // I messed around with the Y value until I  got something I liked
    draw_sprite(sRock, -1, rockX, 16);
    draw_text(rockX+16, 8, global.rocks);
    draw_sprite(sDollarSign, -1, moneyX, 8);
    draw_text(moneyX+16, 8, global.money);

And we end up with this:

Jeff just posted a long-but-good article on distributed version control over at his blog.

…okay, so I haven’t read it yet. But we’re switching over to Mercurial at the office, and he spent the morning working on the blog post, so I feel I should point you to it. Especially if you’re a programmer or someone who manages programmers.

Jeff smart. Jeff program good. Read Jeff.

I just discovered that my friend Steve Gargolinski has a blog, called On Games and Code. He’s a programmer at Blue Fang Games, and you’ll definitely want to check out these posts:

• the slides from Steve’s lecture on genetic algorithms in games
• the video and slides from Steve’s talk on games and intelligence
• if you’re a programmer, even an armchair programmer like me, his post on “primitive obsession” is helpful

Strange fact: Steve and I lived across the hall from each other our freshman year at WPI. I always used to wonder how there were these game industry people who seemed to know each other forever but I’m guessing that in 10 years we’ll get together at some event and reminisce about playing Counterstrike with the guys on our floor. Or maybe Steve’s tendency to play nothing but Jethro Tull on repeat all day every day :)

I’m currently reading a great book on Microsoft SQL Server called Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Querying, by Itzik Ben-Gan. I just came across a particularly funny anecdote in one of the chapters that I thought I’d share.

[This] reminds me of a programmer and an IT manager at a company I worked for years ago. The programmer had to finish writing a component and deploy it, but there was a bug in his code that he couldn’t find. He produced a printout of the code (which was pretty thick) and went to the IT manager, who was in a meeting. The IT manager was extremely good at detecting bugs, which is why the programmer sought him. The IT manager took the thick printout, opened it, and immediately pointed to a certain line of code. “Here’s your bug,” he said. “Now go.” After the meeting was over, the programmer asked the IT manager how he found the bug so fast? The IT manager replied, “I knew that anywhere I pointed there would be a bug.