Too many ideas, too little follow-through
Like a lot of developers, I have too many ideas and too little time to actually do something with them.
That is a lie. I start things quite often. The problem is that I never actually finish them.
A lot of the projects I try to work on tend to get pretty ambitious. Sometimes I get pretty far, but most of the time I lose motivation somewhere along the way and the project gets forgotten. Then I move onto something new and the cycle continues.
What made the difference
After my last project got thrown along the sidelines, I started thinking about all the projects I did finish. What did they all have in common? They were small. You could easily create them in a day or over a weekend. The projects had the potential to be expanded into a bigger project, but they didn’t need to be.
Last weekend I decided to recreate an older project I had made when I was still studying, which was the classic Hangman game. I wanted to see what areas I’ve improved in, and mostly I remembered how fun it was making that game.
I started off making a very simple Piece of Concept. I had a hardcoded answer, a keyboard that got generated, and it would reveal letters according to what letter I clicked. No CSS, no drawing, nothing fancy, but it worked.
I may be going through a God of War phase.
It was fun to already have something working, so the only thing left for me to do was expand upon it and make it actually fun to play.
Trying out new tools
My favorite part of new projects is trying out new things. I didn’t opt for any new fancy framework or library, but I did try out a new building tool (Parcel) and a new way of deploying (Netlify).
After trying out a few task runners or build tools previously, I never really found anything that felt intuitive, or they were way too much for what I needed. Parcel was set up in no time, and I never needed to worry about it afterwards. It’s definitely going to be my go-to for next projects.
My favorite discovery however, is Netlify. So much so that I moved all my other current projects to it.
Netlify makes it really easy to deploy static websites. You push to a repository, it runs a specified command, and boom! Your site is running. I then pointed my domain name to it, and yep, that works too. It’s amazing. And above all, free!
I had heard of the service before, but I never actually checked it out until now.
Custom design and animation
For the drawing of the hangman itself, I also took to Illustrator and decided to draw it myself, instead of taking inspiration from somewhere else. I kept the base of the drawing relatively simple, but opted for a drawing tablet to draw the different faces I had in mind to give it a more unique feel.
What the SVG ended up looking like. I drew all the faces over each other, and then hid every face I didn’t need at a time.
The last time I made this Hangman game, I toyed with the idea of animating each different step of the drawing, but I never actually got to it. I’d bookmarked the library Vivus ages ago, and now I finally got the opportunity to use it. It’s still not quite looking the way I want it to, but it works for now and I’m happy with it.
Working with data
What I also tried, but didn’t succeed with, was using something other than a local JSON file for storing my data (the categories and the possible answers). I messed around with the Firebase Cloud Firestore, but it wasn’t a good use case for that so I went with the JSON file anyway.
The problem with the JSON file was that I was worried people would just look up the answer if they were stuck, but ultimately I was making an issue out of nothing and went with it anyway. I looked at it as an easy way for other people to clone the project and easily fill it with their own data to play around with.
Finished, finally
I finished it Saturday evening. Afterwards I still fixed some bugs, made a few layout changes, and added some features, but they were all relatively small. And incredibly motivating as it was just perfecting an as-good-as-finished project I was proud of.
Check out the demo here.