GMC Jam Discussion The Fuzzy GMC Jam 41 Discussion Topic

Status
Not open for further replies.

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Right, It's time to come clean.

.... I've taken the liberty of putting all the enteries in the jam up for sale in my YoYoCoin market. You can now try to make a quick fake buck by buying shares in other people games (or your own) and hoping the prices will go up and down.

I've included everyone I could see a download link for in the game topic. If I forgot you and you want to have your game be a part of this send me a message, and likewise if you don't want anything to do with it and I should remove your game from the listing.

This was a weird but fun jam. Can't wait to play all your games!
Whats stopping me from buying all the stock in my game and then selling at the highest price to turn around and buying all the stock again
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Whats stopping me from buying all the stock in my game and then selling at the highest price to turn around and buying all the stock again
A $15 purchase fee (so you have to make at least that much every cycle to make it worth it), the risk of the stock price going down (no matter how unlikely), and your own patience because the share prices only change once per minute and in the case of the games not by a whole lot.

Beyond that: absolutely nothing and in fact if you want to do it then you're more than welcome to. There's a poorly drawn banner for the investor who makes the most money come end of voting! Pump and Dump schemes technically qualify as playing my game and I don't have explicit rules against it. The only real rule I'd like people to follow is to only have a single account for fairness sake. I do reserve the authority to ban people trying to make multiple accounts to try and give themselves an advantage.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Ip ban? or just he individual accounts, cause now I really want to make a bot that takes over the stock market
I can do both. I can remove individual accounts from the database, and while not currently set up writing code that rejects connections from specific IP ranges is pretty simple. I don't doubt my hosting company also has some tools for the job, but I mainly use it for freelancing so I've never had the need to see what they offer.

now I really want to make a bot that takes over the stock market
The funny thing is I kind of wanted to do the same. :p

I technically can't stop you, all you really need to sniff out the contracts and endpoints and the *very* minimal security I've implemented. However if you do I'd ask you to;

A ) Only make one

B ) Let me know so that I don't suddenly get a lot of near-unmarked traffic I can't identify

C ) try to not overwhelm my fragile server with requests. You only really need a few every minute: One request to get the values and then one request for any order you want to make. Each order is a single request, so you'd not really need more than 27, one more than the number of games on the market. The Chron job updating the prices runs once a minute, so polling the server more often than that is just wasted bandwidth.
 

bandman28

Member
I do reserve the authority to ban people trying to make multiple accounts to try and give themselves an advantage.
You can try, but you'll never find my bots...
I'll probably disguise my bots as other people's usernames over different devices, so that whoever actually owns the account will get banned 😉
I wasn't actually going to do this before, but when we started discussing it, I couldn't resist
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
You can try, but you'll never find my bots...
I'll probably disguise my bots as other people's usernames over different devices, so that whoever actually owns the account will get banned 😉
I wasn't actually going to do this before, but when we started discussing it, I couldn't resist
You could, you could do that.

You'd also be a meany, and I'd give you a stern finger of shame
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Nah, I wouldn't be hacking other people's accounts and ruining their fun.
I would just be over lording the leaderboard, and that's all that matters
Inadvertinly ruining the fun of people who (even if there probably aren't many of them) want to try to get a good score on the leaderboard without having to compete with a dozen bots.

I'd rather not implement whitelist accounting so people actually need verification for their accounts to be allowed to trade or put any unusually active trader under watch, so I'll kindly ask you that if you do actually want to make a bot do do so with my consent and knowledge and follow some ground fairness rules. I'm expecting like twenty or thirty people to play this at most, most of them once or twice over a two week period. You won't have to make many requests before you are straying away from the bell curve.

A bot tournament isn't a bad idea, but I find network administration dreadfully boring and there is a limit how much effort I can justify on defending a project that is going to be dead in two weeks by design.


If i had my own server, and its sole propose was to open the game and do random data changes to send to your server
effectively I could DDOS a game
Aww, leave my poor server alone. I pay good money for it. Professional webhosting isn't cheap, ya know.
 

bandman28

Member
Inadvertinly ruining the fun of people who (even if there probably aren't many of them) want to try to get a good score on the leaderboard without having to compete with a dozen bots.

I'd rather not implement whitelist accounting so people actually need verification for their accounts to be allowed to trade or put any unusually active trader under watch, so I'll kindly ask you that if you do actually want to make a bot do do so with my consent and knowledge and follow some ground fairness rules. I'm expecting like twenty or thirty people to play this at most, most of them once or twice over a two week period. You won't have to make many requests before you are straying away from the bell curve.

A bot tournament isn't a bad idea, but I find network administration dreadfully boring and there is a limit how much effort I can justify on defending a project that is going to be dead in two weeks by design.
Oh, well, fine. If you say so.
 

Ericbomb

Member
For anyone who plays my game...

Sorry?

My other idea was a "Getting over it" style game, so I guess this was technically the less brutal one.
 
Windows defender antsy today. It ate pursuit by @BluishGreenPro with a trojan warning. I'll have to get it from the games topic.
Yikes. I compiled the game with GameMaker Studio 1.4, and I've seen other anti-virus programs overreact to my games before, but not Windows Defender. Thanks for the heads up!
I haven't modified the EXE past the Jam submission, so you're getting the same experience.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
hear ye!, hear ye!
I find the lack of the jam discord's own emojis to be disturbing and hence forth!
Your humble Jam lord has decided to throw in a new prize!


The first place winner will have there own custom emoji for the gmc jam discord, with approval by them*

*Meaning that they pick what they are fine with and such, particularly something about there game for the jam.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
I notice in YoYoCoin, all the stock markets are the same.
Are you sure?

@yoyo currently sits at 935.58

@stea sits at 193.53

@cant is at 194.89

and so on and so forth.

I mean, I absolutely won't rule out networking errors because I've had a lot of those, but as far as I can tell the actual value mechanic is working all right. Mostly I've had issues with forgetting to filter non URL compliant usernames so people have been hitting issues trying to get their portfolio information because the server can't serve "/portfolio/this%30is%2020clearlyvalidURL"

or do you mean they all look exactly the same on the graph? Because yeah, guilty of that. I was too lazy to even try to distinguish them. As an afterthought maybe I should have used different colors at the least.
 

bandman28

Member
or do you mean they all look exactly the same on the graph? Because yeah, guilty of that. I was too lazy to even try to distinguish them. As an afterthought maybe I should have used different colors at the least.
It would be interesting if, after the jam, the server could run updates on each stock and randomly change the graph then.
Btw, does the graph only run if YoYoCoin is running? It never seems to be updating every time I check.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
It would be interesting if, after the jam, the server could run updates on each stock and randomly change the graph then.
Btw, does the graph only run if YoYoCoin is running? It never seems to be updating every time I check.

All value changes are made by the server once per minute. I have a Chron job calling an aptly named "updatePrices" script that changes the prices depending on things like the latest news headlines, how much demand there is (while *very* minute if more people buy a single share the prices do go up a bit, likewise with selling forcing the price down a bit), and randomly adding or removing a few cents here and there.

I think the supply/demand ratio is that every bought share increases the price by 0.1% over the next hour or so.

The price changes aren't all that dramatic, so most shares are only going up or down by a few cents every minute unless something big is in the news. The prices may well be very similar when you check. You wouldn't believe how impossible a game like this is to balance when you're the only person working on it. I have no idea how much prices should go up or down per minute to make this actually functional. I suspect right now it's on the slower side encouraging a "buy and forget" approach to investing.

The server doesn't care if people have the game running or not, it just keeps ticking. The database table tracking value changes is a good 14000 entries long now. I had briefly forgotten to disable chron job emails when I started it running so my inbox quickly got swarmed with "CHRON JOB EXECUTED" notices.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Wait.... you may be right that something went off. Give me a moment

Edit: It seems my cron job is running a bit slow and is skipping some minutes. Unfortunate. I'll see if I can't look in to it, but yes. The prices update, just at a less frequent rate.
 
Last edited:

dadio

Potato Overlord
GMC Elder
All ma reviews and votes are in. Apologies for the (really) short sharp "reviews" - free time is almost non-existent.
Grats to all for entering! Some great and some very funny entries this time!
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Single exe. Does that make a difference?
Its because Windows sees the single exe as an not signed by Microsoft exe and thus windows defender will complain, this seems to be fixed for gms 2

I feel like maybe in the future, the rules should maybe encourage the zip option over the .exe to avoid this situation as much as is possible?
a way around this for gms 1 is packaging as a zip tho, which we recommend for the jam :)


All entries should work on Windows as a standalone executable / compressed zip folder. No installers please. Your entry can also work in HTML5 and on other platforms, but most voters will be using Windows and therefore your entry should work primarily on windows in order to secure a decent amount of feedback.
seeing this tho :(
I'll make sure to encourage more use of "package as zip" in the future jams
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
After some consideration I've realized that my implementation of a $15 purchase fee when buying stocks prevents people from actually playing the game by making it more costly to jump ship and try to edge out even tiny profit margins.

As such to encourage reckless spending and people making their own financial mistakes without the burden of THE MAN[tm] I've abolished the fee on the server side and refunded everyone their fees. For every time my database noticed you buying a share $15 have been added to your liquid funds.

I can't remove the $15 minimum purchase however since that's hard coded on the Game Maker Client and there are some rounding errors meaning you may not get the absolutely correct amount of shares, but it should at least not be $15 amount of missing shares.

@yoyocoin is on an upswing now and I can guarantee it will be for at least the next half-hour or so because the last three news stories are positive ones, so if you want to buy high and sell higher this is a good time to do it. Just don't hold too long, the coin is fickle and quick to fall.
 
Last edited:

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Are we allowed to buy any stock we want? Or are we just supposed to invest in our own stock?
This is a free market: Invest in however many stocks in whatever order you want for as much money as you dare risk! A lot of people are invested in games other than their own.
 

Mr Magnus

Viking King
Lol we've got a hacker in YoYoCoin
pixel_teampat is gaining money while the graph is going down
Not all shares are going down. Pat is invested heavily in @STEA, which like the other game shares have lower volume and aren't as affected by the news cycle.

Additionally Pat is wealthy enough that him going all in on smaller shares will significantly affect their supply/demand ratio, pulling them up by a respectable amount just by the volume increase alone. We're very much entering the territory of the rich getting richer and runaway profit that's hard to counter. Perfectly legal, a significant advantage over smaller investors.
 
Last edited:

Mr Magnus

Viking King
I would reveal my secret, but then again SCREW THE LITTLE PEOPLE! MWAAH HAA HAAAAAA!
I am looking at a very interesting list of your transactions revealing how you're gaming the system I've so ever carefully set up in a couple of afternoons. It would be very .... "unfortunate" if that information would leak to the public. ;)
 

Pixel-Team

Master of Pixel-Fu
Without sharing too much insider information, I can say that the more you play with it, the faster your money goes up. I just happen to play with it a lot!!! I hope this helps the rest of the players...
 

Pixel-Team

Master of Pixel-Fu
My reviews are up. I had a blast playing all the games, and there were some really creative ones this time!! Thank you all for the reviews so far. And @Alice, I actually did make an "Utter Madness" animation on the top right screen, but I only show it on the second level, since there are no utters on level 1. (I never let a good pun go to waste! ;))
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top