Our first team project with General Assembly was to create a Single Page Application together.
Members: Sakal, Mark, Adam and Inano.
We are working towards a Single Page Application that allows users to create their own characters. These characters can level up, adjust abilities, do what RPG games do. After some time bouncing ideas around and trying to be as realistic as possible - We have decided to water the general idea down. We are now aiming to make a game that is similar to idle clicker games. The theme is: pixelated RPG.
✨ How to use our awesome project: ✨
- Open browser
- Sign up
- Log in
- Create a character
- PLAY! (No link available at this point in time)
We used the following tech'n'tools:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- CSS
- Express
- DOM Manipulation
- iTerm2
- Node js
- Postgresql
- Google Chrome
- Trello
- Draw.io
- Slack
- Zoom
- Canva
- VSCode
Our general approach as a team was discussing every detail of the day, agreeing on to-do lists and being realistic and brutally honest about our skills before working on anything.
Planning what we needed to do was really useful when we started to think about WHO the game would be used by (Generally anyone who can use a browser indepentantly). Which led us to learn about User Stories. Did you know that User Stories can guide you as requirements that turn into features that you can implement inside your app?
WHo our users are, what do they want and why:
Next we focused on visualising each STEP not the full game. Here are some of our plans for our fave features throughout the game such as the fight, explore and sign-up features:
This is an example of our sign up plans:
And this is our first visual mockup for getting the ball rolling - If you've played the game by now you'll notice where we made tweaks.
We're not gonna sit here and lie - There were challenges.
There were moments when we thought maybe we were WAY in over our heads.
There were times when one of us had to delete their repo on multiple occassions.
The biggest hurdle we had was learning how to add, commit, fetch, rebase and push AS upstream OR downstream members and overcoming the fears of "what if this push is the one to destroy everything?"
However, each individual was able to shine where their strengths were - Taking turns to teach each other new things and building confidence as a team to try new things and challenge ourselves. Everyday was one filled with just the right balance of challenges and excitement.
- Some content is left aligned,
- The browser looks beautiful on only one person's pc on a specific monitor,
- Mute and toggle off music button didn't work,
- User experience doesn't completely flow,
- Some content remains through out the game when it shouldn't,
- Some clicks work and others take 3-10 seconds to register...
- Render player wins and monster wins,
- When you refresh browser you stay logged in and can play the game[fixed],
- How much of a pain pushing to github can be,
For Sakal - Enjoyed the API creation. Writing code that allowed the front end to communicate with the backend to get a response back.
For Mark - Enjoyed the API creation as well because it allowed him to create things that were unique.
For Adam - Enjoyed the fight logic behind our Fight Events because he got to learn more about DOM manipulatino.
For Inano - Enjoyed seeing how visual mockups and wireframes became real features from this she understood the power of planning before doing tasks.
You can create your own character:
| char_name | gender | age | level | url |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| generic male | male | 13 | 80 | secret |
| generic female | female | 33 | 70 | secret |
How we planned leveling up, due to time we couldn't reach this scope.
| mon_name | difficulty | drops | health | url |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Golem | gold | Gold Sword | 80 | secret |
| Skeleton | silver | Silver Sword | 70 | secret |
| Mushroom | bronze | Bronze Sword | 40 | secret |
- It's okay to have weaknesses and talk about them,
- When you have an idea, break it down into small steps then break those steps down into tiny steps,
- Patience is a virtue,
- Teamwork is great when everyone remains calm and communicates,
- ONE step AT A TIME,
- Not everything that works in node and browser works for the client in different browsers
- We would LOVE to destroy those bugs above,
- We wanna add more character selections and not just limit it to gender,
- More monsters,
- Item collection,
- Armour and Accessory upgrades,
- Definitely responsive design,
- Animations would be awesome,
- A bit more story telling aspects so theres a mission,
- When character or monster is hit the box containing them bounces and has visual hit "special effects" appear on the boxes for more obvious changes,
- Accessibility features