Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Retrospective: Week Fifteen

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In an ongoing effort to make this chain as valuable as possible to myself (and possibly others), I perform a weekly retrospective of how the past week went (notes from last week). I do this on Tuesdays to avoid conflicts with B'more on Rails, which usually holds events then.

This week (like the week before), I continue working on my (fab) game—a game inspired by the fab.js framework that I am writing for my kids.

WHAT WENT WELL

  • I chatted (while playing tag) with my son in my (fab) game. It is rather nice being able to share this with the kids.
  • Was able to implement an idle timeout in fab.js and broadcast player removal to all attached clients via comet.
  • Got raphaël.js animation shadows working in my (fab) game. Then did it even better (possibly even the right way).
  • Effectively used tracer bullets to drive the chat system in my (fab) game.
  • Finally started in with testing my fab.js code. I have been enjoying playing with the code, but the prospect of using it for something real means that I must know how to test it.

OBSTACLES / THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL

  • Testing in node.js / fab.js. It is really this hard?
  • The kids are now asking to help edit EEE Cooks, which was the original purpose of my second chain.

WHAT I'LL TRY NEXT WEEK

  • More testing. I plan to keep moving forward with the test harness that I copied from fab.js for another day or so. Then I will likely move onto other node.js testing frameworks and possibly even Cucumber.
  • Still have a few TODOs in my (fab) game:
    • constant speed animations with raphaël.js. By default in raphaël.js, it takes a fixed amount of time to move—regardless of the distance
    • graphical, animated avatars
    • collision detection, ideally with an API with which the kids can play


Day #114

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