Alright, so this ‘creator classic golf scores’ thing. People sometimes ask, or maybe they don’t, but I’m gonna tell you anyway, how this little project even got off the ground. It wasn’t some grand vision, you know? Not like I was aiming to build the next big golf simulation. Nope, not even close. To be honest, it was mostly about killing some time and maybe, just maybe, making something remotely useful for once.
It all kicked off a while back. My old man, he’s retired now, and he got really into watching golf on TV. Like, religiously. He even had this old notepad where he’d try to keep score for his favorite players, or sometimes he’d imagine he was playing the course himself. But his handwriting, bless him, it’s not what it used to be. And he kept losing the darn notepad. He mentioned, offhand, “Wish I had a simple little clicker thing on my tablet for scores. Nothing fancy.” And that kinda stuck in my head. I’m no app developer, not by a long shot, but I’d fiddled with Cocos Creator a bit in the past. Made a few things that barely worked. So I thought, why not give it a shot? How hard could it be to just display some numbers and add them up?
Getting Started – Or Stumbling, Rather
So, I dusted off my old Creator installation. First thing I did was try to remember how to even create a new project. Clicked around a bit, watched a YouTube video or two just to refresh my memory on the basics. My goal was super simple: show a hole number, the par for that hole, let the user input a score, and then calculate a total. That’s it. No fancy graphics, no physics, just pure, unadulterated numbers.
I started by just dragging some text labels onto the screen. One for “Hole:”, one for “Par:”, one for “Score:”, and a big one for “Total:”. Looked pretty ugly, to be honest. Just default fonts and everything crammed together. But hey, it was a start. Getting text to show up? Check.
The “Coding” Part – If You Can Call It That
Then came the scripting. Oh boy. My JavaScript skills are, let’s say, ‘enthusiastic amateur’ level. I knew I needed variables to hold the current hole number, the par values (I just hardcoded an array of 18 par scores, like `[4, 5, 4, 3, 4, …]` you know, standard stuff), the player’s score for the current hole, and the cumulative total score.
My first attempt at logic was… a bit of a spaghetti mess. I had a button for “Next Hole”. When you clicked it, I tried to update everything. Read the input field for the score, add it to the total, increment the hole number, display the new par. Sounds simple, but I kept getting `NaN` (Not a Number) for scores, or the total would reset, or it would skip a hole. Classic. I spent a good hour just figuring out how to properly get the number from the input box and make sure it actually was a number.
- Figured out I needed to use `parseInt()` to convert the input text to a number. That was a big win!
- Lots of `*()` statements everywhere to see what the values of my variables were at each step. My console looked like a warzone.
- Realized I needed to initialize my total score to 0 properly. Rookie mistake, I know.
After a bit of wrestling, I got a basic flow working. Enter score, click next, numbers update. It felt like a massive achievement, even though it was probably about 20 lines of really clunky code.
Making it Slightly Less Awful
Okay, so it “worked”. But it was still just a jumble of text. I figured I should at least try to make it a tiny bit more user-friendly. Added a clear “Enter Score Here:” label next to the input box. Maybe a button to “Reset” the whole game. That reset button was another fun little challenge – had to make sure to clear all the variables and set the display back to Hole 1.
I didn’t bother with saving scores or anything like that. That felt like opening a whole new can of worms, and the initial request was just for a “simple clicker thing.” So, if you closed it, scores were gone. Good enough for me, and good enough for the old man’s purpose.
The layout still wasn’t winning any design awards. I just dragged stuff around in the Creator editor until it looked somewhat aligned. No fancy anchors or responsive design. If you viewed it on a different screen size, it probably looked terrible. But on his specific tablet? It was passable.
The “Big” Unveiling and Final Thoughts
So, after a few evenings of tinkering, I had this ultra-basic golf scorer. I put it on his tablet. He poked at it. He actually managed to input scores! He even said, “Oh, that’s quite neat.” High praise, let me tell you.
Looking back, it was such a minor thing. Not a polished product by any means. But it was a fun little exercise. It reminded me that sometimes you don’t need to build something huge or complicated. Just solving a tiny problem, even imperfectly, can be pretty satisfying. And it was a good refresher on the very basics of using Creator and a bit of JavaScript. It’s not like I became a game dev overnight, but I made a thing, and it kinda worked. And for a hobbyist tinkerer like me, that’s often good enough.
So yeah, that’s the story of my “creator classic golf scores.” No epic tale of software engineering, just a guy messing around and accidentally making something his dad found mildly useful. And sometimes, that’s all it needs to be.
