Week 3 of our final project

This week was not an easy one. We found ourselves not making a lot of progress because some of the tickets from this sprint were connected and we couldn’t work on one until the other one was finished. This made working in pairs a bit complicated. We finished the sprint with about 4 tickets left and a retro session where we had a chat and we realised that time is running out and we need to present our game in a week’s time. Unfortunately, because of the lack of time, we have to come up with a MVP that will not include all the features that we originally planned.

One of the focuses of the week was to replace the square blocks with images of a syringe and different types of viruses. In order to do so, we had to change some of the code that we had (use the drawImage function instead of drawRectangularObject). The first image that we played around with was the syringe. It took an entire session and we nearly gave up on using images in our game because it kept flickering and it looked pixelated. We did some research and we found out that this is quite usual with html game canvas and we thought that there is no way around it. Fortunately, some of us are more attentive to details than others and we’ve noticed that the image was flickering because it was being loaded over and over again, every time the display was updating. This was an easy fix, all we had to do was to make sure the render method is only being called once!

We’ve noticed that it was getting harder and harder for some of us to make progress or even understand these small issues because the code was just so overwhelming. We were in need of some refactoring and extracting objects which we did and everything made a lot more sense afterwards.

We’ve also added one virus image to our blocks and made it move from top to bottom with a set x position. For next week, we need to create more viruses with 2 different images and change the x to be in a random position.

Continuous integration was done as well, this time by using Github (who knew??). Work has (re-)started on the collision between the syringe and the virus, and this will be a great place for us to start the next sprint, because it’s about time something happens in our game!

This is also how we feel right about now, approaching the end of the course 😂 (just kidding).