games►javascript

The First Crappy Game

Technically, this isn’t my first crappy game. So I’m already lying to anyone reading this. I have actually made a couple of crappy games and I even released one on Android. In fact, that process is in fact part of the inspiration for this blog. I enjoyed learning something new and developing something that I wasn’t comfortable with. Combine that memory with an ever increasing disdain for my programming day job and this challenge is the result. Create a game every week for a year.

They won’t be good. However, if I limit myself to a week I have to focus on easy to execute ideas and actually trying to be better at programming as well as design. It’s a get good situation.

Let’s begin.

Higher or lower

Everyone has seen some sort of a variation of this game, whether it’s the one of the thousands of other clones of this game already available or the card based format as made popular by ol’ Bruce. God rest his soul.

My idea is based on the classic game with what you could barely classify as a twist. The objective is to play higher or lower and achieve the longest streak possible, inspired by a casino game in the largely toxic and obscure game Tower Unite.

To save wrangling with new languages in the first week of the year, I’m sticking with old faithful javascript. Let’s be honest, anything more is overkill.

My process

So the concept and idea is very simple;

  • Higher or lower is selected.
  • A random number from 0 to 10 inclusive is selected.
  • If the numbers were the same, nothing happens and higher or lower is selected again.
  • If the correct choice was made, add one to the current score and wait for another choice.
  • If the choice is incorrect, reset the current score and update the high score if it is greater than the current high score.

To get something up and running quickly, I templated a simple UI and got to work with the game logic. About half an hour and a couple of games of overwatch later, the game was made.

It’s playable in all it’s crappy glory here.

Future expansion

It doesn’t end there, I’m going to expand on it a bit to use the rest of the week. Things planned are;

  • UI upgrade, make it actually look good.
  • Stored high score & game state, probably through local storage.
  • Displaying previous numbers in current streak.

And that’s about it. A crappy game in a week.