This post is neither about weighing deer nor a newly discovered species of deer-fish crossbreed that lives both in the woods and woodland streams The former would be more boring and the latter more interesting so on the average this post is just fine.
You know how musicians practice scales and basketball players practice free throws? Well, I try to every day do some warm-up code. I fail at doing it every day which means I manage about 3 times a week. I’ll try to do some little problem I can knock off in an hour with my morning coffee that doesn’t have anything to do with the game we are working on at the moment.
This has caused my six-year-old granddaughter to greet me when she walks in the door with,
“Grandma, what about a new game for me to play?”
You can see a screenshot of the one I did this morning to teach X,Y coordinates. Since I rely on jQuery so much, I set out to do a game that was pure javascript, plus CSS and no libraries. Now, I have to do real work.
You can play the game here. When I get time, I will have it show all the dead deer upside down in a row, so there will be 7 if you hit 7 of them, etc.
Spirit Lake: The Game is mostly 3-D animation, I only slip in little things like this between levels on occasion when no one else is looking, because everyone in our company is more mature than me.
Our regular games take years of person-hours in programming time. Fortunately, there are two, soon to be three (Yay!) of us working on them, so that cuts it a little. Still, it’s nice to knock off something that a kid can play immediately and get some immediate gratification.
When we get around to it, we post these mini-games on our TeachersPayTeachers site, which is a misnomer because we give the mini-games away for free.