Wild West Ghost Express

Inspiration

We were inspired by what we could do with SLH's theme!

What it does

You are a sheriff taking the ghost train back home, when suddenly you surmise that wild bandits overtook the train, looking to send you careening towards a watery grave. That is, unless you can stop the train—and the bandits—in their tracks...

How we built it

We built our website out of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to collaborate asynchronously on Qoom's platform. It was fine when we were coding together on one person's screen. However, when we set the project to be collaborative on Qoom's beta version, all of a sudden, no one - not even the original creator - could edit the code. It did work for <1 hour, but afterwards there would be timeouts on connectivity/reconnecting messages.

We also had to come up with a cohesive story that makes sense and implement basically an entire game in the span of a relatively short hackathon/hacking period.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud to have come up with a vision for this project and see our ideas come to life by implementing it ourselves!

What we learned

We learned a ton about:

storytelling - forming a cohesive story under an atypical theme with technical features/functionality that supports the story along with music
implementing interactivity using JavaScript
manipulating the DOM so that we're changing components on one page and not going from one to another page
Chrome's devtools for troubleshooting via the console and identifying placement of coded elements
collaborating on coding together (pair programming, triple/quadruple programming)
pivoting and adapting ideas - we wanted to implement an animated shooting game using HTML canvas, and that didn't quite work out as well as we would've hoped. So instead, we dug deep for how we can still simulate the shooting game we had wanted and we MADE IT WORK!