The Programming Panda

Welcome to the Programming Panda.

Why

With this Blog, I want to show a more real-world example of how development works in practice. I often feel when I’m following tutorials that the examples given are overly simplistic. They get across the point they need to make but often leave out a lot of things that need to happen in real software.

What

My plan is to take a simple game from its initial design all the way through to a fully featured implementation.

Who

This tutorial is for those who already know how to program and have at least done the beginning tutorial of Angular / Node.js, Please follow the beginning tutorials on those if you’re new.

How

I’ll go through some decisions and assumptions to get started and later we may find that these are no longer suitable. At that point, I’ll show how we change the designs and refactor the code to cope with the changes.

The game will be a version of the old and popular board game “Cluedo”. This will be made up of a special set of cards of various categories and the aim is to deduce which cards have been selected and set aside at the beginning of the game.

Initially I expect the development to follow something like this:

• Explanation of how the game works.
• Work out and design some of the types needed.
• We will start with the basic view of the cards.
• Then we’ll add in the basic turns of a game
• We’ll add the end conditions and decide if someone has won.
• Adding in AI to play against.
• We’ll make a backend server that will host the AI.
• Then we’ll let other real players join the game.

We’ll be writing the game in Typescript, Using Angular, bootstrap plus additional modules as we go along.

The back end will be written in node js.

We’ll cover using Git day to day. Creating Branches, merging. Deploying our code to a website.

I hope you’ll join me on this development journey.

Introduction