Programming
I have been programming since I was 9 years old, and have created many interesting things. During that time, I was using the pseudonym, Uncle Snail. Here are a few examples of programs I created on Khan Academy in Javascript:
Shepherd
Age: 17
Time: 15 hrs
Lessons:
Graphics optimization,
Loading screens,
Short deadlines
Shepherd is a game I created as a challenge against my brother to create the best game in 15 hours of creation time. That means we could only be creating - art, story, programming, testing, debugging - for 15 hours. When work begins, the clock starts. When work ends we move on. Also, we had to finish the 15 hours in one week, otherwise we would be cut off. My idea was a puzzle game where the player leads civilians to safety. Everything in the game was created in 15 hours. By the end of the challenge, I had a working, playable game with a few levels. This is a slightly enhanced version, with some errors fixed and polishing added It is still basically the same program as I originally created in 15 hours.
Bird Bait was my first major project in programming. Fortunately, it turned out well and I learned a lot. My largest challenge was thinking of a way to make the menu as a seperate state from the main game. I finally thought of a boolean variable to tell the program whether the menu was active. In later programs, I discovered the novelty of setting a single variable to control the state of a program. I would later discover that I had stumbled upon the concept of a finite state machine.
The idea for this game was that the player would have to keep two objects in mind as they fly through the dangers of the sky. Only one object is under the player's direct control, adding an extra twist. The bird follows the seed.
Bird Bait
Age: 13
Lessons:
Functions,
State machines
Planet Generator
This was a larger project that I built in pieces. I coded each function individually in a separate program, then combine them into a single program to show off each piece.
Simply put, it uses procedural generation to create graphics using the ProcessingJS library that are then stored as images, saving processing time as opposed to drawing all the shapes each frame. It also generates names for different entities on the planet, based on arrays of sounds that are added together using algorithms.
