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Ironhack Full Stack Developer Bootcamp - Week 2 - Calvin Torra
We were actually given the entire curriculum as an online platform that contains all of the documentation for the course in English which is useful for me. If I get lost at all in Spanish I have the online platform as a backup.
It only occurred to me the other day to skip ahead and see what things need to be done at the end of each module. And For this first section, it's an HTML CSS and JS game.
All of the lessons for the next few weeks leading up to the building, presentation and submission of a game, which was a bit worrying for me as I've never done that before.
So that got me pondering on what my game is going to be about?
Obviously, it shouldn't be too complicated as I'd end up not finishing it, but after doing a little bit of youtube searching to see what is actually possible I'm now a little obsessed.
For instance, there's this guy Drew Conley who just walks through the mechanics of his javascript game, the graphics look super cute and simple and they remind me of those old Pokémon games on the Gameboy.
I'd love to make something like this and if I start early enough maybe I can crank out an MVP in time for the end of the module that is not a complete pile of crap.
I've never read a lot of fiction so my imagination is really crap compared to when I was a kid. All of my books are instructional how-tos or knowledge books.
However, when I'm super tired I do binge-watch this youtube series called the SCP Foundation. I have no idea how I came across the first video but it sucked me into a massive rabbit hole of never-ending stories.
The SCP foundation stands for "Secure Contain Protect". It's a community-based wiki that includes elements of many genres such as science fiction, urban fantasy and horror....and I looooove horror.
I'm thinking maybe the game can be a simple puzzle game, a monster has breached containment, one or two puzzle features, maybe a scare jump and a count down timer until the SCP Monsters catches up with you and does its thing.
I haven't actually felt excited about a project in a long time, so I feel that If I try to achieve this, I might be able to make something I'm actually proud of.
A work colleague warned me not to make things too complicated........but I'm sure there must be a shortcut I can take somewhere.
So For example, something that I found fascinating is a sprite sheet. Rather than animated characters you simply rapidly change the X and y position of the sprite sheet and hide the rest. This happens so fast that the player's eyes simply see a moving character. Things like this can probably save me time in development.
I'm probably going to make a start on this game idea this week and I might document the journey whether I succeed or fail.
I guess it's more of a form of accountability than anything else as I usually get bored of side projects pretty quickly.
Now that I think about it, I don't know if we're supposed to do this in pairs. If we are then I may have to make this game on my own time rather than burden someone with my silly ideas and over-ambitious projects but we'll see.
Back to the course.
Map, Reduce, Filter, Sort.
It's quite interesting how early on they introduced these methods as they aren't easy concepts to get your head around as a beginner.
We had a brief intro into how they worked and then we got told to crack on with solving some problems.
Problems that I thought were pretty intense for someone's second week of programming.
Array.Sort tripped me up quite a bit this time around.
We had an array of 250 objects that contained dates, titles, director names as properties.
We had to sort these in ascending order by their date....fine, but if two objects have the same date, those two had to be sorted alphabetically - all in the same sort iteration.
I've literally never seen this pattern before and even had a hard time finding solutions or examples online.
Naturally, I came home and spent another hour digging into how Array.Sort actually works under the hood and how to get it working without just copying and pasting a solution found online.
Now that I've got it, I'll probably make a video for my future self as that will probably come up again at some point.
I was looking forward to pair programming again but this time around I paired up with a new person.
I think this guy was a little bit similar to me in the sense that he just wanted to be in his own headspace and crank out the problems.
So we exchanged a few words here and there but in the end, we were solving the new challenges in our own way and moving on without waiting for the other to catch up.
Not ideal, but I guess this is the reality of working with other people on a mentally taxing exercise.
Some people are going to be more open to collaboration while others just want to crank out the code and get in the zone.
Not quite sure which one of those I am yet.
I've already moved away from Mochi and found something called Zorbi. It's a free app and I've already loaded it up without 50 new Spanish words to remember. It's already one of my favourite apps just for its ease of use
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