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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

My first coding project: 2048

I'm now into week 4 of my web dev boot camp, meaning I'm almost one-third of the way through, crazy!

Honestly, there are times where I feel like there is no possible way that I can be remotely competent in just 12 weeks, but then I saw some student projects from the previous session and it motivates me to remember that they were just like me...and now they have real, working products!

I just uploaded my first working game, which is based on the original 2048 game:

"So you agree? You think you're really pretty?"
Don't be too harsh, it's my first working code as a whole and I didn't focus too much on aesthetics (as you can tell).  I used Mean Girls as a fun theme to motivate me.

If you don't know about it, try it!  It's a simple but effective time-waster.  You're basically trying to combine the same numbers together until you get a 2048 tile on your board.  This hasn't happened for me yet but you have this bright pink version to try it on!

We made this game to learn and understand a bunch of new concepts and be able to use them in a real context and then played around with different effects afterwards.  To summarize:


  • This combined HTML5, CSS,  and CoffeeScript (converted to JavaScript)
  • The board fades in
  • Every time the numbers combine, the background tile image changes
  • Every time you hit a new high tile number for the first time, the background image and movie quote change
  • The score tally is simple but functional
  • Alerts you when 'game over'
  • Used two-dimensional arrays to build the board


This project was from two weeks ago (we started it in our second week) so we've already moved on to new topics, but I'm already trying to think of a few different ideas that I'd like to try out in a couple months.  I do have a key topic in mind that I'm really excited about, so hopefully I can put my thoughts together enough to build it.

Hope all is well in the real world!

xx K