Week 2 Recap

2 Down, 12 to go

This week certainly had its obstacles. 

I say this meaning both in terms of my coursework, and life in general. But nonetheless, I trudged through.

Coursework

The coursework for this week was building command line games. I was really excited to get into this; how could you not get excited to be building a game?!

Rochambeau

Also known as 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'

The first game we built was the classic 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. This tested our user input and made sure we were utilizing the basics of the "if/elsif/else" statements. It was fairly straightforward. I was tempted to, but did not, end up making 'Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock'.

I'm still not sure why paper covers rock counts as a win...

Farkle

The game of guts and glory!

The second game we built was a basic version of the dice game Farkle. As far as the topic of mathematical probability goes...I think I had more interest in the subject after I was old enough to actually go gamble somewhere. Basically, it's a simple 'roll the dice, get points' kind of game. I only built the game to the basics, as I found that when you add the additional rules (as was a portion of the homework on 'Nightmare Mode') ...let's just say it got a bit hairy.

I'm going to pause in the coursework for a moment to interject with a bit of 'fun'. 

...and when I say 'fun', I really mean 'mold that is somewhere hiding in my apartment, causing me to get sick and miss a day of class'.

"My...what...beautiful eyes you have...?" 

Courtesy of my apartment

...So that happened.

Being the regular Sherlock I am, I pieced together the clues: 

1. My roommate having a cough for months that wouldn't go away, but magically did when he stayed with his fiancee 

2. My heightened allergies that seemed to rocket to crazy, cannot-seem-to-function levels when I stayed at the apartment for prolonged periods of time 

3. The musty smell of the apartment 

(...And finding mold in a few places. That helped my sleuthing efforts, too, ya know.)

*24-hours of not being in my apartment.

More on that story, as it develops. (The story, not the mold.)The end of the week was a bit of catch-up to get everything back on track. Which brings us to...

War!

What is it good for? ...cards.

The next game we built was the card game War. ...Now, before you think to yourself, "That can't be that hard", I have two things to remind you of:

1. I've literally been programming for a week and a half at this point. 

2. Take a moment to remind yourself how war is played. 

Now that you've reminded yourself, for anyone reading this who may know how to program - think about how the hell you would need to write the code so it properly handles the situation of two cards matching, laying out the 3 cards, then comparing the next in a 'war' situation. ...it's a -war- in and of itself to code that. I didn't venture into that, as Chris mentioned he accidentally omitted this notion for the first cohort and, as a result, they accidentally got "Super-Nightmare Mode" for their "Normal Mode".

Blackjack

After figuring out the makings of the card and deck class files, calling on those, and getting a better grip on how to properly use self., blackjack was MUCH easier than War. 

I played a bit of Blackjack when I had my landscape architecture internship in Las Vegas a few years ago, and I found myself having a lot of fun building this program. I successfully managed to catch up with the coursework this weekend, and complete blackjack on 'Hard Mode', just in time to get to work at HopCat on Sunday.

Overall

Still optimistic. Still excited. 

I'm looking forward to this coming week - we'll be learning HTML and CSS, with how they are utilized by Ruby. I've heard both encouraging and preparative stories for how this coming week may go. I'm hoping my graphic side will lend itself well for the coming assignments.

ONWARD!

And thanks for reading