TAMAGAPURI!
In the late 90s, Bandai released to the world the “Tamagotchi!” It was AWESOME! I was only 7 years old, but they were wildly popular, many iterations came after, and by the early 2000s, I got to play with one! I was hooked. I still love the concept of a virtual pet to take care of. Probably because I don’t trust myself with a real pet. Especially after I heard a weird sound coming from my Tamagotchi and saw my frog like creature in angel wings to signify that I had in fact killed my pet. It was… traumatizing.
This is the inspiration behind Tamagapuri! According to wikipedia, Tamagotchi, “the name is a portmanteau combining the two Japanese words tamago (たまご), which means “egg”, and uotchi (ウオッチ) “watch”.
Well since my project isn’t on a handheld device, or at least not a watch, I created my own portmanteau of Tamago and Apuri (アプリ) which means “App”!
The concept is quiet simple:
You have a pet. It has 4 main attributes: health, hunger, boredom, and happiness is an average of the first three.
Here’s the homepage:
You can create monsters, go to the store, or gamble!
You have two goals: Keep your monsters alive and don’t run out of money!
When you gamble you can win BIG or lose by a lot.
When you shop you can get 4 different categories of items.
Buy items, keep your monsters alive, and that’s where the fun is!
CHALLENGES
I heard a story once: a dad is teaching his son to code and he heard his son exclame from his room “YES! I DID IT!” He told his son “That feeling of accomplishment will never go away.” Later he hears his son exclame “NO! WHAT IS WRONG!? WHAT DID I BREAK!?” He told his son “That feeling will also never go away.”
It spoke to me.
The Devise Gem
Thankful to my cohort lead for showing us how to set it up! There are some challenges though. After a while of googling I did find the solution to adding an extension to validate strong passwords.
Devise and the extensions are a great gem to make sessions, validations, user signup, and login a simple process.
Bootstrap
I have developed a love hate relationship with Bootstrap. It’s a CSS issue and not understanding the frontend as much as I wish I did. Which lead me to a great appreciation once again for frontend development. I will be focusing more on how to work with frontend.
DRY Code
Refactoring and to make the code more DRY is a challenge I enjoy everytime I take it on. My favorite was figuring out the slot machines. I wanted it to be able to accept a bid and determine an award. I learned alot from previous classes. I have learned that “case when” statements are my personal favorite for this kind of thing.
Final Thoughts
I know this is the most exciting blog post you’ve ever read, but I’m not a writer. I’m a coder. I have learned one extremely important thing in all of this… I love to code! Its an exciting moment to google and google and read and then find out how to make what you want happen and a small moment of “I’m a genius!” I love that rush.