Created as a personal project to learn web-based development, this set of projects encapsulates exciting and easily shareable content inspired by viral web experiences like Wordle.
Headlined by my first foray into web development, Durdle, the set of games is visually cohesive around the papaya whip background and the Courier font.
Each project uses hand-coded HTML pages, CSS styling, and JavaScript interactivity.
Each game was focused on a small challenge with a means to share the level of success of a person's attempts. By creating share systems attached to each small game, players are encouraged to develop community and share progress.
These games included two based on already existing material: Word Hive (based on the New York Times game of a similar name) and Durdle (based on the hit game Wordle). But the rest of the games stemmed from personal designs and interests.
A personal favorite from this group of games is the Dictionary Race. Inspired by friends racing across Wikipedia, using hyperlinks to navigate, this game formalizes the process and uses a Dictionary API, turning every word into a hyperlink to its own definition.
Containing an Exploration mode, a race mode, and a random mode, this game created hours of fun and exploration through the English language.
After I found myself distracted in classes, attempting to get faster at typing on various typing websites, I decided to create a tool to focus that energy on studying for the upcoming Senior Year International Baccalaureate Exams.
The user can export study sets from Quizlet and import into the tool. Once a section is completed, each word becomes interact-able and by clicking on a word the user can get more definitions or additional context.
Using server side PHP and a MySQL database each ranking of words provides data and is logged in the database.
By having many people complete daily word rankings, the database holds a relative ranking of most English words.
These projects were all great in developing web design and development skills. Taking small games and developing communities around them has been a deeply rewarding experience and it's been great to teach me many of the web development topics I use regularly.