I come to you today with my post mortem insights, woes, and revelations.
I will begin by saying that a lot of things went well with this project. It ended up coming out fairly close to what I was expecting it to look like, even a little bit better. All the instructors, and levels were working the way I wanted them to. Only the "special features" like the word bank and a more aesthetically appealing user input didn't work out well. Before I talk about those special features that didn't work out the way I wanted them to, I'll focus on the things that went well. I think because I really did already have an idea of how I wanted it to look that it helped me stay focused on making sure that is the way it happened. I didn't have to spend a ton of time looking for pictures, backgrounds, or think of color schemes because I already knew what I wanted them to look like.
As for what went wrong I realize that a lot of things that I implemented that were extremely time consuming like getting the unicode for kanji, putting in the meaning, making buttons, and drawing images on the screen I did naively the first time and at the end had to go back and spend time redoing them so that it would be easier to implement the next feature. For instance at first I had two separate arrays for the kanji and the meaning of the kanji, but in the end I had to go back through and make them a double object array (which was faster anyway) so that I could randomize the kanji and not lose the meaning so that the games wouldn't just cycle through the arrays in the same order every time. Also the time and effort I put into all the Chapter Buttons and instructor buttons could have been fixed if I had made them all objects instead of doing calculations by hand each time when really they all ended up being in the exact same positions on different screens.
I think the biggest surprise for me was finding out that I could use html from Morgan. Things like my buttons or even successfully implementing the user input on screen instead of on a popup would have been so much easier if I had known about ui.innerHTML. I guess I was also surprised by how difficult it was to actually get all the unicode for the Japanese characters into my game since I had assumed there would be some sort of partner to them, but there wasn't.
I think that my development time breakdown was fine actually. I only got off track when I had to go back and redo functioning things so that I could properly or more efficiently add a new feature, but as for how I had paced/scheduled myself for my code I stayed pretty on time with everything.
If I could redo this project, I would definitely ask a lot more questions before I began. If I had asked beforehand about a lot of things it would have saved me the hassle of having to fix/redo them later.
As for my next game......
I at this current moment really don't have any real idea of what I want to do, because I really like anime ( Japanese animation) I would love to do something based off of that. As I type I think that maybe I'll make a game/quiz of some sort that determines what anime world someone would be best suited for. It'll take them through various levels and at the end they will be sent to the world that is best for them.
I do think this is feasible. I definitely think I just need to write down everything I want for the game though since it is something I just came up with. I'll definitely need to be a bit more on top of graphics as well since I want this to be a bit more visual based than my previous game.
Estimated Time:
Day 1:
Find all the pictures that I can feasibly think of that I will need for this project, so that way I don't have to spend valuable coding time later looking for a picture. I will already have it. Limiting myself to....say 5 different anime world options that means I'll need at LEAST the following pictures:
1 Guide
8 Main World Pictures (2 for each)- Slice-of-life, Pokemon, Hell Girl, Psycho-Pass
1 Path of a Road
4 Main Characters (correspond to the anime)
I expect finding pictures should only take at least an hour and no more than two.
In which case I should still have about two hours left in the day to find some sound files. If there is any time left I will begin making code for the pictures and definitely begin working on all the questions and short games.
Day 2:
Begin/Continue to develop/code for short games and questions.
Day 3:
Continue making short games and questions.
Day 4:
Continue/finish making short games and questions.
Day 5:
Finish making short games and questions.
Day 6:
Game should essentially be up and running at this point so it should just be detail work at this point.
Day 7:
Finish detail work/ Functioning game.
I am most worried about not being able to think of enough short games. I definitely want it to be more of a movement through a game based on decisions rather than just a quiz with pictures. I also am worried I am going to get really overwhelmed with making pictures and everything look perfect and I will get distracted with making pictures work than the code, but we'll see what happens.
That is all for now.
Ta ta!
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