Another week already! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!! This constant march of time is quite inconvenient.
We have finished our Project Plan, set up our version control, and created our UI mockups. This coming week, we are starting to do the fun work. We will be transferring our Project Plan to tasks on our Trello board and beginning the code. Our first steps will be to get the basic client-facing routes set up and working. I anticipate this to be fairly simple, but involves laying out the basic page designs and filling our database with dummy data. This is where, I believe, the majority of our time will sit: figuring out the visual layout and building the connection to the Datastore database. I look forward to the work.
This past week, I did run through the React.js tutorial. While the tutorial was not nearly explicit enough for what I would like, it does a decent job at running the absolute basics. I am looking forward to working through the framework and getting it to work. On the surface, it feels a bit like working with Widgets in Flutter. I took a Mobile Development course last term, in which we worked extensively with the Flutter SDK and the Dart programming language. React seems to revolve around Components that are built with HTML in the JavaScript, which feels odd, but these Components are pieced together in a tree that processes State in very specific ways. This reflects the structure and implementation of Flutter Widgets pretty closely. I find it quite interesting. I could be way off here. We’ll see if I’m off the mark soon, I suppose.
On a side note, a group of friends and I have decided to try to make a game. In 2020, we participated in the Game Maker’s Toolkit (GMTK) Game Jam, an online event where teams of developers create a simple game adhering to a vague theme over the span of 48 hours. At that time, I did not have a strong base with software development, so my role was relegated to collecting sound effects, play testing, and level design. This was fun, but not ultimately satisfying for me. Now, we’ve decided to have our own “game jam” experience, with just slightly less pressure. We are using this 48-hour period to bang out a quick proof-of-concept of a project that we will determine during that time, based on a random vague theme. Once the game jam is finished, we will decide if this project is worth expanding into a larger work, shift to a different project based on a mechanic that was developed, or scrap the whole thing and try again. This time, I will be able to contribute to the coding side of the project, which excites me and my teammates.
Now, I’ve been working on this post for long enough. Farewell, dear reader. I hope you haven’t been too bored.
