My gamedev side road journey as a frontend developer - week 1

Welcome readers to my side project diary!

Introduction

I'd like to share the story and thoughts so far I had from the start up until the end of the side project I'm working on. The biggest reasons I start this, is to give this process more structure and also to help other devs that are feeling the exact same as I did/do.

A little information about my younger self: Writing about parts of my life is very valuable. At age of 10, I started writing a small newspaper of a few pages 2 time a week. I did this, because my parents wanted to help me improve my language. At that age, it was not my favorite thing to do, because I loved gaming and didn't care much. I still kept writing 2 times a week, though with some push from my parents here and there, for 7 years. And I am happy to I did, because it is like a timemachine for me. I can recall much easier what I did, and where I was, which is fun on itself in my opinion. The real message I want to tell that writing is really valuable if you want to learn new things. That's why I like to talk about my side project I'm working on.

Earlier side projects

I'm working as a frontend developer for 4 years now. Most of the times, I still feel like an imposter, like many of us frontend developers do. I also did a lot of unfinished side projects, which I think I handled very inefficiently in my eyes when I look back. I "flew" in the project with a vague global idea of what I wanted, and just started building. Building a few simple features worked out okay. But working on a fairly complex side project needed some more guides and structure. I didn't have such. I kept forgetting what I wanted to build exactly and for what, then lost interest in the project and value of the idea, while the projects were also far too hard and big at that time. Most certainly without any kind of structure.

The game side project

So after a warehouse full of failed and unfinished side projects, I felt bad. I need projects that challenge me to learn the things I want to get good at, and something I really like to build. I struggled with this a lot. Why build something that already exists? And what does it solve? Well, I should keep in mind that it solves one of my great goals: Building a cool app/website that also allows me to get me more knowledge of programming subjects.

Then I started "metselen".

Enter "metselen" the game

So I started this game side project out of nowhere on a Tuesday evening. I remembered this small game that I was playing in primary school, and I wanted to rebuild it and extend it with my own ideas. But first, I started writing exactly what came up into my mind, and made little user stories out of that. This helped me to setup a small structure, so when I returned to this project later, I knew where I left off, and what/why I wanted to build this again. Very useful.
I also introduced talking about this project on a weekly basis with a colleague of mine, who helped me up to speed and still encourages me to work on it, because he is interested in the game and the steps I take.

"Metselen" is a dutch word which actually means bricklaying. In short, the game works like this: You answer multiplication sums and for each correct answer, you'll get a brick in a given time.

An earlier version of the game: