Days 8 & 9

This is part of my 60 day challenge to myself. Want to know what it's all about? Check my intro post here.


Day 8
Not a lot to post about on day 8 and travel kept me from posting on the day (not to mention messed up my fitness stuff a bit as you'll see), however to put it simply, I had a lot more testing and issues with the randomization code. Nothing super interesting in terms of the coding, just fiddled around with some values and tested a lot but didn't get where I wanted to. Still saw things landing heavily on option 3 and got a little frustrated. BUT, day 9 (today) turned out better!

Day 8 Fitness Stats
Exercise: 2mi. Walk (weaksauce!)
Weight: ??? (No scale at my hotel.)
Calories: 2143




Day 9 (Part 1)
This went much better. I'll start right-off with my end results because I just finished running my tests and am really happy about it:


Loooook at that! I'm pretty much where I need to be with the randomization. Finally!

Just to note, yes option 3 is showing more prevalent here, but it made a big comeback in the last 4 rounds of my 25-round test, bringing up the average very heavily. Part of the beauty of randomness I guess. Up until that point, everything was pretty dead even.

After messing with the code I had for a while and just adjusting some numbers but getting nowhere, I decided to change-up one of the functions I was using within GameMaker. In short, to add a layer of randomization to the selection process, I had used a basic random() function to start the selection timer on a random cell every time the test button was pressed. For whatever reason, this was not working at all and results skewed heavily on cell 3 still.

So I decided to change out the random() function with the choose() function. Setting this value and forcing GameMaker to pick between specific integers vs. a random range seemed to do a LOT for the code I had in place. I'm really, really happy with where the randomization is at right now which is probably one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for this whole project.


To avoid a massive post, I'm breaking this up in to a 2-parter since I have a little more to talk about, but wanted to cover this more important breakthrough first. The next one will have my day 9 fitness stats as well. Great day!