Intro

The other day I run into Install Fee Tycoon on indienova, which was released yesterday. Played for a few hours and enjoyed the nostalgia it brought to me, thus writing a walkthrough / meme explanation for it.

Background

It’s an idle clicker made in Godot within one week to stand as a hilarious memory of what might have been, if the entire games industry didn’t collectively explode in panicked revolt during the recent Unity pricing model back-and-forth. If you enjoy Cookie Clicker, mostly you’d it this too.

Meme

Note that I may not explain all of them and just add a KnowYourMeme hyperlink.

After the initialization, you would have a Reinstall.bat on desktop and annoying Clipbro who is definitely the bad old Clippy in the early days of MS Office. Luckily this time it would indeed give useful hints about the game.

There is a dashboard you can hire various assistants (like Script Kiddie, Chatbot, MIT Drop Out, Crypto Bro and 40Chan Mob) to reinstall Chaos3D. The dashboard is titled Cloth Road, which implies the now-gone Silk Road marketplace on Dark Web.

Of course there are far more hidden / unexplained memes for you to explore. Even those upgrades have unique names & descriptions.

Take click upgrades as an example:

Characters

Chaos3D Corp

A CEO with random buzzwords that can be used later to reply Gregory Peter (innovative, synergistic, disruptive). I love this email so just quoted it below:

ANOTHER MILESTONE CROSSED Another doubter demolished. Another space disrupted. A new wave of talent synergized. We can’t lose. We CAN’T FUCKING LOSE. I can’t tell you hou happy I am with our progress. Every day, I EXPLODE out of my bed and start making deals immediately.

Maybe it’s a great deal that transforms the space with disruption. Maybe it’s just a great deal on printer ink. Every moment is a win. Everyday is a victory.

Keep going champ. Together, we will change the world.

Chad Chadderson CEO Chaos3D Corp

Grandma

Grandma loves her dog so the password is its name. And when later devilish James Smith wants a victim who’s old and vulnerable, give him your grandma’s number. No need to hesitate and worry like me, cuz she turns out to be clever enough not buying gift cards for scammers! Now that you give away her phone number, you wouldn’t mind betraying her another time. Relax, she would escape and even ditch that darn phone altogether.

Mikey Jacobson

Mikey Jacobson shares his network drive and warns me NOT to look at his file, which absolutely urges me to DO something inside Mega Secret Folder 2 inside Super Secret Folder 5 inside Secret Folder 3. In return, he creates more folders and subfolders, not knowing that I would find and delete his secret stuff with a single command. Security by obscurity does not work, sadly.

Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker is a guy who loves collecting spyware, ransomware and all sorts of online shit, and claims that it’s not my fault. Of course, PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard), but not him XD. Scatting all these in desktop, he wants you to connect via remote desktop and fix the problem, simply by deleting all those crap into recycle bin.

Later when Diamonds Hands ask you to share an IP address for EZ money, here his goes.

TypeOneError

TypeOneError is a bad programmer since he stares at this problem on www.l33tcode.com/hw (LeetCode, you know) for hours…

private void PrintHW()
{
	string hw = "????? ?????";
	Print(hw);
}

You know, hello world!

When you solve this in 10 seconds, he replied with another piece of cake on www.l33tcode.com/fizz:

int n = 3;
for (int i = 1; i <=n; i++){
	string item == "";
	if (i❓ 3 == 0)
	{
		item = "Fizz";
		GD.print(item);
	}
}

Although I have no experience in GDScript, just try out operators one by one, and % is the correct answer.

Accessible AI

This unlocks when you upgrade Virtual Assistant to certain levels, perhaps. Then Accessible AI (aka. OpenAI) would message you about an issue that reduces the operating sufficiency with workaround. Just run the command and Virtual Assistant becomes more productive.

Anon

Running Webscape:www.not-reality-game-engine.com/admin does not help. webscape:www.not-reality-game-engine.com/admin won’t work either. Changing it now and then and it just fails to show the source code, so I stalled here.

As a nice return gift to share this walkthrough, comments pointed out that Webscape:View Source or webscape:view source work with the admin portal open.

So now you know the admin is as dumb as me to use admin as username and root as password, and forgets to change them later on.

Hacking

I’ve been a fan of Kairosoft (and pixel art in general) for many years, and keep buying Steam ports since their summer vacation bundle in July. While it’s fun to just watch the characters move, I’ve played most of them in the past on mobile so usually I would use Cheat Engine (along with Kairosoft Wiki) to do a speed hack like making it run at 8x speed.

Cheat Engine

As an idle clicker game, Install Fee Tycoon shares similar characteristics like Kairosoft games. So I try a few ways to exploit it as well. The hacking itself is also fun. Weird enough, Godot (or at least this game) seems to have abundant support for this. Animations do not change that much but chaos wallet balance does increase much faster and built-in stats about play time increases by 20 times when I set the speedhack to 20x in CE, although play time would reset after a restart (balance would be kept).

AutoHotKey

Another attempt I made is AutoHotKey. Like I said in Zen of Windows, AHK is easy to use and get started with. This is the sample script, which is reused and actually written 4 years ago when playing Kawaii Deathu Desu.

; autoclick.ahk
; Author:  Vinfall
; Lastmod: 2023-10-11
; License: WTFPL

; Introduction
; This script helps you left-click automatically

; Technical Notice
; If your keyboard does not have function keys like "F8"
; or you simply want to change that, just RTFM.
; https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/lib/GetKeyState.htm
; https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/lib/Send.htm
; https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/lib/Loop.htm
; https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/lib/If.htm

;SetKeyDelay 0

Loop
{
	; Press F8 to terminate this AHK script
	if GetKeyState("F8", "P")
	{
		break
	}
	Send "{Click down}"
	Send "{Click up}"
	Sleep 20
}
return

Be careful when executing as this loops 50 times per second. It would open a lot of files if the cursor is in the undesired position. Be more careful changing Sleep 20 to a smaller interval. Press P or F8 to get out of this infinite loop.

Ending

Yes, you read that right. I did not expect nor realize it before I saw the discussion on Steam Community. According to replies from the dev, there is an actual end game - but it requires 2 things:

• One of them is getting into the centre of the million billion bucks circle.
• And the second thing is unlocking the very last puzzle for the last contact.

Thoughts

I really like this kind of weird stuff. Similarly, I wrote a guide for GashiShachiNoSachi which is a weirder game that brings me back to the early days of Internet. You don’t know what comes next. Maybe it’s a random weirdo with ugly yet addictive illustration, or a webpage full of misplaced elements that makes perfectionist choke out. They are not so modern as webpages curated by those frontend designer, or as broken as X (aka. formerly Twitter), but their owner do share the same nostalgia with me. This kind of journey is why I like the Internet and would live in Cyberspace for the rest of my life.