Connek4

Summary

Connek 4 was built to fulfill a learning assignment where the only requirement was to “Build a Connect Four app within 24 hours.” Plus, I have many fond memories of playing this game in a miniaturized version on road trips and random gatherings. Now I can play it anywhere again, without losing any pieces!

Did I mention how fun it is? You can see it in action here –> Connek4

Explanation

This was completed within a few hours after a bit of thinking, research, trial/error, and left as-is once I got it to a working, complete point that I felt satisfied the submission requirements and basic game rules. I hadn’t touched jQuery or JavaScript for a couple months as I was focused on Ruby and Ruby on Rails learning at the time. Once this assignment was presented, I decided immediately that jQuery would be a great way to control the interactions with the grid, and would provide me with a simple way of calculating win conditions once the underlying scaffolding was completed. Bootstrap was used to provide a quick and simple template for empty slots as well as red and yellow chips.

Conclusion

This was a very fun project for me. During my early days of learning DOM scripting, the topics were coming at me fast and furious, and I struggled a bit with how I was navigating nodes. After a few months of coding in another language, coming back to jQuery and JavaScript suddenly felt more natural, with my mind immediately choosing a direction that felt like a good fit and simple for me to work with. I may make some changes in the future, like adding in a more realistic grid and animations that show the chips falling in place rather than the user clicking the bottom/first available slot. For now, I feel this will be a good marker for me to reflect on my development journey.