Epilepsy Warning

This program allows users to create flashing images.

Some people may experience a seizure when exposed to certain visual images, including flashing lights or visual patterns.

The risk of photosensitive epileptic seizures may be reduced by taking the following precautions:

Use in a well-lit room.

Do not use if you are drowsy or fatigued.

View with greater distance from the screen so that it fills less of one's field of vision.

Should you experience any sensations of light-headedness, dizziness, nausea, altered vision, eye or face twitching, jerking or shaking of arms or legs, disorientation, confusion, or momentary loss of awareness, then please immediately stop playing and consult a doctor.

Community

Come and join our growing community of enthusiastic coders at fuzearena.com

Make friends, hone your skills, talk to the Fuze Team and share your projects!

Hope to see you there!

Introduction

Hello! Welcome to FUZE⁴ Nintendo Switch. Congratulations on your awesome purchase!

If you're new to coding and not sure where to start, you've come to the right place! In this introduction we'll be covering a few important things to bear in mind whilst using FUZE.

If you are an experienced programmer already, we recommend that you jump right in and flex your coding muscles! You can find a detailed description of every function, keyword and operator in the Command Reference.

Coding is an incredible skill. Every electronic device, video game and piece of software you've ever used all run on code. The world would be a very different place without it.

Before we dive in to some details about the software let's get a few things out of the way.

Learning to code is like learning a super power. You can find it difficult to get things right at first, you will make many mistakes, you might even think your new powers aren't working for you. Just like with everything else in life, practice makes perfect.

Keep honing your skills, figuring out problems and completing projects. Soon you'll be a coding super hero!

Improvement takes time, so don't be disheartened if you get things wrong! Every error (or bugs as we call them) you fix makes you a better programmer.

FUZE⁴ Nintendo Switch gives you a handheld environment to create anything you want. But where to begin?

Well, here are a few important things to keep in mind.

Computer Languages

You may have heard that computers are very complicated things. This is true to an extent, but one also say that in some ways they are very simple and logical.

A computer understands two things. On, and Off. True and False. 1 and 0.

A computer's brain is called the CPU. It is made of lots and lots of switches that are Simply on or off.

Where it gets complicated is that there really are lots of them. Billions and billions actually.

Whenever you use a computer to play a game, message your friends, surf the net or do your homework, what you are doing is changing billions and billions of switches incredibly quickly.

How does your computer manage to do all these things using just 1's and 0's? A very clever chap called Gottfried Leibniz invented something called the Binary Number System, and it is vital to all computers. We'll talk about binary in more detail later.

Now, it would be quite boring and incredibly difficult to write a whole program using 1's and 0's, so some incredibly clever people developed computer languages to "speak" to the computer in a way which makes more sense to us.

There are many computer languages out there in the world. Thousands and thousands of them. They're very different to each other and are designed for different reasons.

The language you will be using here is called FUZE!

FUZE is similar to languages you might use if you study Computer Science at school, or even those used by professional computer programmers. However, with FUZE we have put great emphasis on making things simple and intuitive to learn and use.

Formatting

When writing code we can lay it out in lots of different ways, we call this formatting.

Here's an example of some messy code below:

  1. loop
  2.               ink(fuzepink)
  3. print("HELLO"  )
  4.     
  5.        update(          )
  5.     sleep(    1)
  6.  
  7.          repeat

We have lots of random spaces and blank lines for no reason, but, and it's important to say this, the code above will work just fine.

The program is a small loop, we are printing the word "HELLO" in a nice pink colour, waiting for 1 second then repeating the loop.

The same code formatted differently will work exactly the same. See the example below:

  1. loop ink(fuzepink) print("HELLO") update() sleep(1) repeat

It doesn't matter to FUZE whether your program is written on just one line, but as your programs get bigger and more complex it will make finding bugs and editing your code much more difficult!

How we format our code will have a big effect on how we read it, so learning at the start how to format our code correctly will help us greatly in the future.

Compare the previous examples with the formatting of the code below:

  1. loop
  2.     ink(fuzepink)
  3.     print("HELLO")
  5.     update()
  6.     sleep(1)
  7. repeat

Doesn't that look neater, some might say more logical?

Now we can easily see where our loop begins and ends, and everything in between is tabbed.

Remember: this code above will run in exactly the same way as the previous examples. The only difference is that it is easier to read and edit.

The projects and tutorials in FUZE are all formatted this way. You don't have to copy us, in fact you might want to make up your own style of formatting that works for you!

Syntax

Here's a strange word which you may or may not know!

Syntax describes the structure of statements in a computer language. Certain statements must be structured in a particular way if we want them to work. Take the example below:

  1. prin t("see the mistake?")

Can you spot the mistake we made?

We've made a crucial syntax error. We put a space between the "prin" and the "t" in the word "print". FUZE will read this as two separate statements.

If we correct this syntax error, we get:

  1. print("see the mistake?")

Now FUZE knows exactly what to do and we'll get no error.

Let's see another very similar example:

  1. print("what about now?)

This one might be trickier to see, but we've made another syntax error.

Can you spot it?

We're missing a {code:"} before the last bracket! Without it, FUZE will be confused by what you want to print.

Certain statements must be laid out in a particular way, and this is often to do with punctuation. Always double check the placement of your commas, speech marks and brackets.

Functions and Keywords

During the tutorials you'll be seeing a few words again and again.

Something you'll need to know for the upcoming projects is what we mean by a function. We'll go into more detail further into the tutorials, but for now, take a look at the line of code below:

  1. print("Print is a function.")

When we want to print words on the screen, we use the print() function.

See the brackets after the word print? This is how you know we're using a function! In FUZE, functions will also appear in a light blue colour.

Functions usually need some information in the brackets to work. For example, the print() function needs something in the brackets to print on the screen.

Here's another:

  1. ink(green)

This one is called the ink() function. We use it to change the colour of text on the screen. This time, we put a colour in the brackets!

When you see the name of a function in the FUZE tutorials, it will have brackets after it, like this: print()

This is to make it as clear as possible that functions always have brackets after them.

Keywords are a little different. They do not use brackets, and in FUZE⁴ Nintendo Switch they appear as a red/pink colour. Take a look below:

  1. loop
  2. repeat

The two lines above are an empty loop. loop and repeat are keywords.

Keep your eyes peeled in the upcoming projects to see clearly which parts are functions and which parts are keywords.

Let's get started!

Well done for reading all the above information. You are now fully equipped to get started with the tutorial projects and begin your journey to coding mastery! Looking forward to seeing you in the tutorials, let's go and have fun coding!