Back to Hell and back again
This is a group project blog which follows our journey to make a game using pure JavaScript. This post covers Monday and Tuesday of week 1.
The final two weeks at Makers Academy for any cohort tends to be a whirlwind — from the final project idea pitches on Friday prior to the anticipation of whether you’ll get your first choice or second on Monday.
With Eddie distributing the groups as smoothly as his well trimmed beard on Monday morning, I found myself assigned to my first choice — game! With me are partners in crime Julian, Tom, Charlene and Alfie.
Each group received a 20 minute slot with coaches to discuss their ambitions and ideas and we were the first ones to step up to the plate. Bats in hand, we shuffled down to the beloved Sunfish room (complete with a yoga ball — they know me too well) and did a brief draft of our ideas, looking to hit a home run.
There was an amusing variety of ideas which took another two hours to veto down into the one we eventually cut it down to — Fakers Academy (name of game pending… much like our group’s!), the bootcamp simulator where you have to survive 12 weeks (or cycles in our game) and based on some magical score, you job title could range from Katsu Stand Worker to being the next Elon Musk! Our ambitious MVP is to have a box/sprite/character move.
Collectively happy with our process, I enlightened my group with the before noon discount at the katsu wrap stall.
The first two days were an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. We already had a good idea of who would be in our group beforehand (based on witty detective work such as asking cohort members “what’d you pick?????”) and discussed using React Native for our game over the weekend — our rationale being that it’d be cool to have a mobile game on both iOS and Android along with React being ~the current hotness~.
Consulting a few of the coaches, Kay and Sam M (as opposed to slick city haircut Sam J) politely suggested that we try coding it in pure JavaScript instead, prodding us to think about what we want to achieve over the next two weeks. As we left instilled with their wisdom, our next logical step was of course to give it a shot in C#.
At the time, it seemed to make sense. A couple of us are interested in roles in the gamedev industry at some point and the other members were also up for the challenge. C# is one of the most popular languages in gamedev — so off we went to figure out how we were going to TDD our game, set up our environment and find a Unity alternative since we wanted to code the logic ourselves.
My advice after the first two days? Don’t do it unless you all have Windows laptops. Coach Mark put it very politely when he said the IDEs and support provided for Mac was immature. I thought this was an excellent synonym for a much more offensive choice of words — my personal family friendly choice would be tragic.
Long story short, Tuesday afternoon fell and the group mood was somewhat dejected, throwing in the towel on C# (even if we didn’t particularly want to), eliciting a discussion on what language we should focus on.
We initially settled on Phaser.js, a game framework for all of ten minutes (TDDing a well used library reared its ugly head as an issue once more) before we eventually decided on doing it in pure JavaScript. Like we were initially advised to do.
Not wanting to waste any more time than we felt we already had, I found a tutorial on the MDN docs about how to recreate Breakout. As we started a mob to go through it, I went off to the weekly Tuesday yoga sesh, needing to unjumble my thoughts.
Heading back to my group an hour later, I found out that we had the knowledge to achieve our MVP! They did hit it but it was spiked to get some ideas of how to put it together — so back to the drawing board to do it right.
The tutorial demonstrating the wide array of things we could do with just JavaScript gave us a bit of a morale boost and instilled a drive in us to delve in further and just see how spicy we could make our RPG-simulator-survivor-bootcamp-something-or-other game.
In the next post, we’ll demonstrate some screenshots of how our game is coming along with the trials, tribulations and of course, the group memes.
