Coding Bootcamp: Project Four

This project is supposed to be the pinnacle of all you have learned over the last 11 weeks, but as this week hit I could feel the exhaustion hitting me. I could also see it in everyone of my fellow classmates. I knew before I had started that I would be spending all of my time learning to code but I didn't realize how it would consume me. I would leave the house at 5:30am and not get back until 7:00pm. Even on the weekends I loved taking on new challenges and learning something that was outside of what we were doing in class. But this pace cannot be maintained, even if I was loving every second of it.

I had an idea for my last project. It was crazy and I thought why not give it a try? I wanted to make a game. One that you would be able to move your player around your screen and encounter monsters and treasure. Now this was a big project. I started with trying to hit the goals for passing first. Creating the back end was the easy part about this. All I needed was tables for players, monsters, weapons, armor, and treasure. Using Express.js I was able to have the back end up and running in a couple of hours.

Now the hard part. How was I going to render the player on your screen? I spent the rest of the day looking at how I could accomplish this and found Phaser.io. Phaser.io is a framework that uses HTML canvas to create games. Implementing this seemed like it would be the prefect thing for my game.

The next day I used Phaser.io to create a little platform game that was apart of the tutorial and it seemed easy enough to use. My timeline was very strict with what I needed to get done in order to have a project that I could turn in and be proud of. So having a direction that I needed to go in I was off.

By mid day on the third day of this project I had found that I had bitten off way more than I could chew. Phaser.io is a great framework and is perfect for what I was doing, but trying to make a full game in three days while I was exhausted was not something I could accomplish.

Sitting there and looking at where I was at and how much further that I had to go was very defeating. This was supposed to be my best project and at that moment it was my worst. I let myself feel bad for 10 minutes. I got up took a walk around the campus and then got right back to work.

A game was not going to happen in the time that I had left. That's ok time to pivot and take what I already had and make something just as good if not better. What did I have? The back end was already done and tested so I had something that could hold all of these things for my game. What could I do with it? I could still have people hold their players. So I came up with a character creation for Dungeons and Dragons characters. With a day and a half left I used React to create a front end that as a user you can create, view, and update characters from your Dungeons and Dragons games.

At the start of this project I had high hopes for what I was going to achieve. In the end I was not able to provide exactly what I wanted but I was able to realize it before it was to late for me to change. The ability to take a step back and know that the thing I've been working on is not going to be done by the time that I needed it, and still being able to provide something that I could turn in is the most valuable lesson I have learned at General Assembly.

Check out this deployed project at: https://ejparnell.github.io/front-end-capstone/#/sign-in

Check out the repo at: https://github.com/ejparnell/front-end-capstone

If you like what you read and feel like I would be a great fit for you team. Check me out at: https://ejparnell.dev/