In the first post of this blog, I talked about the whole process of building the website up to its launch. In this one, I add a bit more to the story and how it led to this project.
In October 2019, at the peak of my frustration with how the website's design was turning out, I ended up looking for online JavaScript courses on YouTube to learn a bit more about how to make the website better (that alone says a lot about how little I knew, since the website only really started to improve once I learned more about HTML/CSS, not JavaScript). Even so, I found this video, which completely grabbed my attention:
"Wait..." - I thought - "So I can make a simple game in 5 minutes and make it available for anyone to play, without installing anything on their computer, using only the basics that already come with it?"
Yes, Daniel from the past, you can, but it's not as easy as the video makes it look. Right after watching the video, I took the Udemy course it promotes and, in 3 hours, recreated basically the same game you can play here, but... it wasn't exactly what I wanted, because the limitations of a course like that became obvious.
Technically, the course teaches you to make a fixed-size game controlled only with the mouse, which would be terrible for anyone visiting on a smartphone and unthinkable for any self-respecting website in 2020. OK, so it's just a matter of making a few tweaks and it's done, right? Well... no. The problem with guided tutorials like this one is that, although you come out with a practical result, you rarely become independent enough to try new things and make them work (and I'll say that JavaScript is a terrible language to be lost in like that).
With so many problems popping up at every step forward, my attention split with another game I found more interesting to code and play (I'll launch it here in the future too), and the end of the semester approaching, I only added two selectors, one for the maximum score and another for the difficulty, and shelved the project.
When I launched the website at the end of April 2020, I decided to go after shelved projects to keep myself busy in my free time during the quarantine imposed by the pandemic, and I rediscovered this one. Now, with the experience gained while building the website, the process actually flowed and practically every problem was solved.
I won't go into every step forward here, so I don't lose what little attention I still have from non-technical readers after this wall of text, but for the curious, I recommend poking around the code in my games repository on GitHub.
I still plan to add more game modes, so come back in a few days to play them. ;)
Update: Tennis and soccer game modes added!
Now, without further ado, go to the project's page and play! =)
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