Alright, let me tell you about this little experiment I called “swol baseball.” It wasn’t some grand ambition, more like a weekend thing that kinda got a bit out of hand, in a fun way. I just got tired of all these super-serious baseball games and simulations out there. You know, the ones where you need a PhD in statistics to understand the player cards? Nah, that wasn’t for me. I wanted something dumb, something that made me laugh, something with raw, over-the-top power. That’s where the “swol” part came in – I envisioned players built like cartoon superheroes, hitting baseballs into the next county.
My First Blunders with the Bat
So, full of enthusiasm, I thought, “Okay, I’ll grab one of those fancy game-making tools everyone talks about!” Fired it up, looked at the screen, and man, my eyes just glazed over. Buttons everywhere, menus within menus, tutorials that were longer than most movies I watch. It felt like I needed to go back to school just to make a ball roll. What a pain. I spent a whole afternoon just trying to figure out how to make a simple square appear on the screen and then decided, “Nope, this ain’t it.” I’m more of a “slap it together with duct tape and see if it works” kind of guy, especially for a silly idea like this.
Stripping It Down to the Bare Bones
That’s when I had my “aha!” moment, if you can even call it that. I decided to go super, super simple. Like, embarrassingly simple. Forget fancy 3D graphics or realistic physics. My “swol baseball” needed just a few key things:
- A pitcher who throws absolute smoke.
- A batter with muscles on his muscles.
- A ball that goes REALLY far when hit. Like, orbit-achieving far.
- Maybe some ridiculously tiny fielders for comedic effect.
That was it. The core idea. I figured I could just use some basic scripting, maybe even some super simple drawing tools, stuff I already kinda knew or could pick up in an hour. The goal wasn’t to make a masterpiece; it was to make myself chuckle at the absurdity of it all.
Fiddling ‘Til It Felt Right (Kinda)
So, I started piecing it together. Got a circle for a ball, a rectangle for a bat. The pitcher was just an arm that appeared and flung the ball. The batter? Another stick figure, but I imagined him being incredibly buff. The real “fun” – and I use that term loosely sometimes – was getting the ball to react like a rocket when it made contact. Lots of tweaking numbers, seeing the ball shoot straight up, or sometimes straight down into the ground. It was mostly trial and error, heavy on the error.
I remember this one time I was messing with the gravity settings. I wanted the ball to hang in the air for a comically long time after a massive hit. Well, I messed up a decimal point or something, and the ball just… floated away. Forever. Like it achieved escape velocity from my little program. Didn’t even come down. I just sat there staring at the screen, then burst out laughing. That’s the kind of “bug” that makes a project like this worthwhile.
You know, this whole thing really got going because I was laid up for a few days. Twisted my ankle trying to show off some old basketball moves – yeah, not my brightest moment. So, I had nothing but time and a craving for something utterly pointless to occupy my brain. “Swol baseball” was the perfect patient.
So, What’s the Score Now?
Is “swol baseball” a finished product? Heck no. It’s more like a collection of silly experiments. The graphics are still terrible, the gameplay is repetitive, and it probably only entertains me. But that was kind of the point. I wasn’t trying to build the next big thing. I was just messing around, trying to make something that captured a very specific, very goofy feeling of exaggerated power.
And you know what? It was a blast. Sometimes it’s good to just build something for the sheer fun of it, without any pressure for it to be perfect or useful to anyone else. It’s a good reminder that not every project needs to change the world. Sometimes, just making a digital baseball player hit a ball into the digital stratosphere is achievement enough. Keeps the brain cells from getting too rusty, if you know what I mean.
