Choices: A React-Redux Horror Game (Part 2)
As a blog post on my final project, this is going to be a long one, but here we go…
It all started with a story — a story that I’ve been wanting to write for a while, maybe about 7 years now. The concept of the idea was thus: a stalking entity following you to your home and you don’t even know if they are real or not. Your reality is broken, you know only fear.
Honestly, it’s because of my love for survival horror games as well as my favorite video game being Silent Hill 2 that I wanted to make a game that could almost compete with that type of dread and despair that those games could bring someone.
But alas, I know the basics of React, Redux, JavaScript, and Rails — maybe I could use that to make a game. How hard could that be?
Unfortunately, aside from the story being written — I did not anticipate how far up I was reaching in my skills for this final project. I did, however, want it to be good and done well — and therefore, future employers can see what I did and see that I am applying my knowledge and understanding key concepts.
In order for me to really get started on this, I was going to have to understand how my code was going to work. I wrote a story. I wrote what prompt would come up if the user were to choose a certain choice. To make it easier on myself, I gave the user two choices. There would be two endings — good and bad (and maybe in the future I can write up different endings if I ever come back to this project). Overall, during the story writing and route writing, I felt very confident on where it was going to go.
Initially, I had written up my final project on one repo ‘FinalProject’. I thought I would be able to grab my API information and use it within the frontend of the project within one repo. However, after much research, I started to understand that I could place my API information; all my seeds containing questions, prompts, endings, etc.; I could use an outside source like Heroku to deploy my API.
Unfortunately during my research, with sites like Heroku, you can’t upload your backend API if it’s linked with your frontend. So, I had to create two separate repositories: choices_frontend and choices_backend.
From there, the Heroku add on worked — changing my ruby seeded information from SQL to POSTGRES readable information.
Now that that was finished, it was time to work on the front end stuff. I wanted to make sure everything worked and looked the way I wanted it to-really grungy and red — something you see out of a game like Silent Hill.
Okay. Good start. Is this something I wanted? Let’s go further.
It worked — it was just nothing I really wanted to see. The buttons were not something that looked great — I needed to change those — Also, I wanted to add sounds and ambiance.
The major problem I kept running into was displaying my information — I didn’t add redux and it ended up working, however, the main part of this project was redux.
So adding it was a challenge. It wasn’t displaying anything at all — so much so that I needed to ask for help from my fellow classmates.
So, now, I’m back where I am at — trying to display my information properly but with the addition of redux.
Hopefully, before my final review, all of my information stored will be up and running! I can’t wait to graduate :D
