Hungry Healthy Hippos!

https://ayalalaura.github.io/Unit1Project-Game/

As a throwback to one of my favorite childhood games, Hungry Hungry Hippos, I created a fun click-only game where the user feeds their pet hippos healthy foods. But beware of the tempting, delicious junk foods or these herbivorous pets will get sick.

Development

• The bulk of my time spent working on this project was rooted in planning. Through lots of white boarding, pseudocoding, wireframing, notetaking, trial and error,and more white boarding, this fun little game came together.
• I set out to create a game that was fun to make and fun to play - very colorful and appealing to the young at heart. This was a helpful idea to come back to when I needed to put my grand designs in check and be realistic in terms of time constraints

MVP

• functional game flow where foods fall; bad foods are totaled into junk score; good foods add to total score
• when clicked on, foods give respective scores
• win - total score 300
• lose - junk score over 200

Reach

• effects when both types of foods are clicked on
• audio
• high score board
• junk-o-meter

Objective

• Beware of the junk! Click on too much junk food and your pet hippos will get sick

Tech

• HTML - structuring the layout of the game. Mostly divs, to be filled with JS
• CSS - what's a fun game without lots of styling??
• JavaScript & jQuery - functionality of the game: essentially two arrays of falling foods with staggering patterns that, when clicked on, add score to either total score or junk food score, which determine whether user wins or loses. We have a love/hate relationship.

Wins

• Time management is always an issue when working on projects, but I was able to stay on top of my MVP by using tools like any.do and Trello to keep track of my progress and to-do's.
• It works!!! It has been very rewarding to see this game come to life. I am very proud of this first project. It meets all the necessary requirements and reflects a bit of my colorful personality.

Challenges

• As incredibly proud as I am of my improving JavaScript skills, I struggled with syntax. The functionality is there, but I know that I can brush up on syntax and creating cleaner code. There's always room for improvement!
• The planning phase consumed most of my time, so I was unable to meet a couple reach goals: creating a vertical meter to visually measure the junk food score as well as adding audio to make the game even more interactive and engaging.