My Coding and Programming Adventure

When I started playing PC games over 12 years ago, I got a glimpse into the world of coding and programming. My journey began with a famous game many people know and which served as a starting point for many other developers in my age range: Minecraft. Minecraft is a survival game based around blocks and has a vibrant community centered on modding and commercial servers. Little did I know at the time, but Minecraft would go on to ignite my deep interest in coding and programming. Minecraft is a game about creating, so it was the perfect combination for someone like me.

I started by making and modifying code for servers to add functionality and features when I was as young as 13. I didn’t create anything overly complex or in-depth, but the ice had been broken, and my curiosity was piqued. I developed simple plugins to add silly in-game features and gradually moved on to intermediate programming and some object-oriented programming. Minecraft is coded in Java, and I used the Eclipse IDE to write my code. Years of playing Minecraft eventually led me to explore other games as well. I got into platformer games, colony management games, tycoon games, and the ever-famous first-person shooters and their subgenre: survival games. At one point, I was determined to create a survival first-person shooter game centered around surviving a zombie apocalypse. I drew inspiration from popular games at the time, like Call of Duty, Rust, and DayZ.

I downloaded the Unity and Unreal game engines to experiment with them and familiarize myself with the languages those engines used: C# and C++. These languages were different from Java, which I was most familiar with, but I was able to grasp many of the lower-level concepts fairly easily, thanks to my experience with Minecraft. I even created a humorous zombie game where hordes of Danny DeVitos would chase you, and you had to fend them off in waves. Alongside my game development experiments, I spent a lot of time working on HTML and websites using tools like Webflow and WordPress. While these platforms didn’t teach me to code directly, my desire to understand how they worked led me to learn how to recreate the websites I was building. I spent time creating websites for random businesses, commercial gaming servers, and fun side projects like portfolio websites.

Througout this class I've made a game in the "idle clicker" genre where the player clicks a box and it adds a coin to their bank. Here's a few snippets of what I've worked on during that, specifically learned from this class:

// Update HTML values
function updateDisplay(id, value) {
    const object = document.getElementById(id);
    object.innerHTML = value;
}
// Add a chat message
function chatNotif(message) {
    const chat = document.getElementById("chat");
    if (chat.innerHTML == "Notifications") {
        chat.innerHTML = message + "<br>";
    } else {
        chat.innerHTML = message + "<br>" + chat.innerHTML;
    }
}
                

Here's some work I've done on a similar game in the "idle clicker" genre. This is a game where you click a button and it "mines" a block. You collect different blocks and this is an example of the use of arrays, objects, and event listeners that we learned in this class.

let blocksArray = [
    stone = {
        name:"stone",
        amount:0,
        probability:.8,
    },
    coal = {
        name:"coal",
        amount:0,
        probability:.1,
    },
    iron = {
        name:"iron",
        amount:0,
        probability:.1,
    },
]

const mineButton = document.querySelector("#mine");
mineButton.addEventListener("click", () => {
    let rand = Math.random();
    let cumulativeProbability = 0;
    for (let block of blocksArray) {
        cumulativeProbability += block.probability;
        if (rand <= cumulativeProbability) {
            block.amount++;
            console.log(`Mined x1 ${block.name}`);
            break;
        }
    }
});