Second Week of Projects

Anki Donates a Set to Hackbright

One of the Hackbright mentors has been working on Anki Car for quite some time and they donated a set to Hackbright yesterday. You must watch this video. It is a very cool toy and I had a lot of fun playing with it. Even the tutorial is really fun - they got Sir Patrick Stewart to voice it. And we can now play anytime we want! Once Hackbright is over and after I decompress a bit, I will totally take guests to Hackbright on weekends to play with it if you want to try it out.

A Glimpse of my Project

I hesitate to share with you a picture of my project so far because I need to fix the color scheme/layout and not everything is working yet. But I have been working very hard on it and I am proud of what I have accomplished so far. I can feed my program a string of letters that represent the background map for any given game level, a pet type (choice of bunny, dog, or penguin), a pet name (the player gets to name their pet), and a list of directions, and the pet will execute those directions. Eventually, the game map, pet type, and pet name will come from my database - every new person who logs in will choose their pet and start playing at level one, and my app will update their progress in the database so that every time they log in to my site they can view their own account with all their saved data.

As I said, right now I am just feeding the bunny a list of directions and it executes those directions. Currently I am working on the "go" button and the arrows so that when you drag and drop arrows into the blue code bar and hit go, the bunny moves according to the directions you gave. I spent a lot of this week putting restrictions on where the bunny can go, what to do when it reaches the carrot, what to do if it doesn't reach the carrot, what to do if you tell the bunny to move to a spot where he isn't allowed to go, and how to make the bunny delay between each move so that you can watch him go from one square to the next instead of him moving instantaneously to the endpoint.

So far from this project I have learned:

• html5 canvas - that's the game board and the bunny
• html/css organization - the arrows/buttons/code bar and their layout
• a ton of javascript - the game logic
• DOM - using javascript to tell html what needs to change on the page depending on changing factors
• jQuery - a weird javascript library that allows you to do things like drag and drop the arrows into the code bar
• how to use my amazing mentors to help clarify fuzzy spots (or gaping holes) in my understanding

Anyway, I have a lot of work to do and I am going to get back to it now. But I did want to show you what I've spent the last two weeks working on. Every little step is a new challenge, and although it's been very up and down, I am slowly making progress. Onward!