Accountability Update #1 — Incremental Progress

In my last post, I fangirled over Universal Paperclips and announced my intention to build my very own incremental (aka clicker) game. Since I don’t know a whole lot about game design, I set some goals to help myself learn.

What I set out to do this past week:

1. Start this course on Coursera to learn more about game design.
2. Create a simple incremental game using this tutorial.

What I actually did this past week:

1. Started the aforementioned online course with the best of intentions.
2. Got distracted by a code challenge a potential employer asked me to do.
3. Got distracted by meetups and networking.
4. Got distracted by fangirling when the developer of Universal Paperclips replied to one of my tweets and recommended the same incremental game tutorial I was already planning on following.
5. Got distracted by “research” into incremental games. In my defense, I really do need to learn more about the user experience these games provide since I’m pretty sure mine will be sort of… atypical by the time I finish it, given the amount of story it’s likely to involve.
6. Sat down with my writing partner and worked out some of the details of the game I want to make and resolved not to even try to work on that game until I’d made a completely simple, basic incremental game.
7. Finally started the incremental game tutorial! Being me, I immediately decided I needed to style the page and the buttons before I could do anything else. Because… I don’t know why, really.
8. Spent a lot of time researching things like “how many times can you scream before your voice gives out” because — well, I’m a writer.
9. Ended up with this, um, work in progress which, at the time of this posting, has only has one functioning button and doesn’t save anything to localStorage (yet).

I didn’t exactly finish up where I’d planned to be by tonight, but I’m excited to move forward from here. So without further ado, here are my goals for the next week, bearing in mind that I have a technical interview to prep for and I committed to starting the JavaScript30 challenge on November 1st.

1. Finish the incremental game tutorial! This means I need to (at least!) add cursors and the ability to save progress to my baby game.
2. Do one JavaScript30 exercise each day starting on November 1st.

Wish me luck! Check back in the next week for updates on how I do.