Setting up for success
From the very beginning I made the decision to adopt a ‘hands-on coding’ approach to help improve my computer coding skills.
I’d already built a niche valuation website for collectors of the British comic, Commando, so I thought I had some knowledge of what was needed. What I didn’t realise was the number of different computer languages I would need to develop a music puzzle game. I also didn’t realise how much code I would need to write in order to make it work.
Yes, I could have used ready-made templates or even asked AI to build it for me, but where’s the challenge in that? I wanted to physically write, test and debug code from scratch. To understand what each bit of code did, how it interacted with other code, how it could be written more efficiently, and most important of all, how to write it in a way which would be easy to maintain and update.
The first thing I did was buy a notebook. I’m old-school, so like to write things down in order to help them make sense. I tend to lose track of where I am when coding on screen, but a notebook helps me make sense of the logic behind links and the way pages flow. It also helps me to keep to-do lists, of which there have been many.
I already had the concept so drew a diagram laying out how pages would flow when a visitor wanted to play. I concentrated on getting the basics built, knowing I could add to it when needed. The first website I turned to was W3Schools where I was able to learn how to create a basic html page and introduce CSS for styling it the way I wanted.