Rootul and I came into DBC this morning to find that our teammates where we left them: still coding on DBC machines, and a lot of work to show for their all-nighter. Holy moly tomatoes: Julius, Sid, and David got our computer-controlled ghosts to chase our hero, parsed the tile map JSON into an awesome board, and now it looked like a real game for the first time since we started the project. Which was great, because it was time to demo our MVP to our instructors and cohort.

I hadn’t realized how serious a demo it was until our cohort mates got up there and demo’d some seriously cool mobile apps (many kudos to the Newts, half of whom learned either Swift or Objective C over the weekend in order to create mobile apps for their final projects). I probably would have thought through what to say more - but I think we did quite well on the fly. It helped that our app was so concentrated on a single feature - the game - on which we had all worked. We were all intimately acquainted with the guts of the game, and could talk easily about the work and technology that went into it - many, many hours with Phaser, Firebase, and Rails. Thanks Rebecca for the helpful feedback - project our voices, tell more of a story, get appropriately technical, don’t distract the audience by having too much going on.

Afterwards, it was back to work: I paired with Rootul and together we were able to figure out how to send and receive player coordinates to and from Firebase so that two unique visitors to the game url would be able see a single character move around on the screen, which was an amazing feeling the first time it worked. We got terribly stuck on how to scale that up into 2 players and beyond, and spent all afternoon and all evening on it until we both decided to walk away, but left completely convinced it was within our grasp - after a little sleep. (Spoiler alert: it was.)

Author:

Cassie Moy