The Gate
That’s my favorite command in App Inventor. As I predicted, coding is not fun; it’s tedious, and it hurts your back and eyes. Now, I like writing, and one of the key elements to any good work is the reduction of redundancy. Coding is the opposite, where redundancy is what makes sure you get things to work. Now you might rightfully be asking: where does a group fit into all that?
I have many words about my group, but I will synthesize them into one: hopeful. We wanted to do a lot when we first met. The idea was to make a game like Poker or Blackjack, and we quickly found out how hard that was, and had to pivot. My group is not very artistic, and that’s wonderful; that’s what I do. So we kept the cards but decided that we would make it something unique.
This was where my skills were most useful. I found a theme for the cards: rocks. Don’t think the ugly ones, we’re talking Gems. In all honesty, I was recommended to use Yu-Gi-Oh cards as a template, but I didn’t fully like that idea, because it didn’t go with App Inventor. They were too “decorated.” So that was how I became the creative lead of the project: I made the cards and explained how they worked, and, as a group, those ideas were refined until we established the final rules (of which I will not spoil here as they could very well change).
The Ninth Circle
So when I got back from that meeting, I got paper and pencil (yes, very old-school), and I came up with character designs. I had artist’s fatigue at the end, and those little, and in many cases disproportionate faces, took me too long. I always reassure myself with two things: players would be more focused on winning, and they have character.
Even though this took time, it was not as dreadful as interacting with the actual coding of App Inventor. That was not fun, and it will not be fun for the final part of the game that we had in mind. I helped code many things; half the time was spent watching videos and trying to understand what the blocks did. Another third of my time was watching videos, trying to piece together how to make things happen. A sixth of my time was actually coding, and the last sixth was spent not understanding why things didn’t work.
I was in charge of the connectivity, making sure that all the buttons worked, and that did not go well. By the time people tested our work on Wednesday, people commented that it looked nice (I did that), but that the buttons didn’t work, and that they struggled to get back to the home page (that was also me.) Trust and have faith, they work now… hopefully.
In The seven terraces
Games are not only their code, and I’m not saying that because I didn’t do the brunt of the coding, but because who cares if you can code, who cares if you can write with grammatical perfection? If you don’t have ideas if you can’t market them; you’re nothing. I think that both are needed to be successful. I would like to say that is present in our group.
Unfortunately, there were further issues in scheduling frequent meetings. The college lifestyle can be so challenging. Take that whichever way you want. Please remember that when you see those cards, I coded them in, I created them, and I managed to make what I like relevant in a hostile block world of confusing colors that take up a lot of space and time. But they are rewarding in the end. I am happy to have had the possibility to work in a group. I am happy with what we have done, and I hope and pray that it works well on test day.
I could not resist… This is a little sneak peek into the game. One of the levels, and this was the design that I came up with. I know that some of my peers complained about the font. So that means that I have to justify why I kept it. It goes with the vibe, and that’s all you need to know, and I know that’s a terrible justification. I will philosophize it.
Life is more than just the title; like with coding, it’s never what you see, it’s also not what you can understand. It’s always what’s underneath. Even then, you might read the code and think you have it all figured out; that’s not always the case. It might take time to get it, but once you do, it has more value and tells you more about the story than what might first meet the eye. Life is a multifoliate rose (if you got that you know you’re books.)
Those four cards look nice, but they represent hours of work and critical thinking. Things that should be done in groups where everyone can bounce off each other and create a better overall product, and that is what I hope my group will deliver. 🙂