My First "Serious" Project :)

Last week started with changes in SimpleBeat web-site design (I changed the background from plain brown color to simple "wooden" texture), and it continued with making the header for the web-site, original typography art-work, rendering "SimpleBeat" in bold white letters with outline effect.  It may seem a bit out of style, and I am going to fine-tune it this week.

 

As far as my programming and studies go, I've learned a couple new concepts:  HashMaps and Layouts.  These concepts are Java-specific (at least Layouts scheme), so I am not spending much time on it.  My Java course should be over by mid-April (which is in three weeks), and I'll be starting C++ as my second course.

 

To practice Arrays and Layouts I am going to do a few practice exercises.  And here's a brief overview of my first exercise, a variation of Hangman game, which I call "Harakiri", and which is styled and related to Japanese culture.  In traditional Hangman player guesses the letters of a word, and if he makes a mistake the picture gets updated with new details of the hangman.  In my variation the hangman is samurai (Japanese warrior) ready to perform harakiri (ritual suicide), and the only way to prevent samurai from doing it is to guess the word correctly making the least of the mistakes possible.  The word list will contain English words originated in Japan, or famous places in Japan (some well-known and not so much entities like "tsunami", "Tokio", "banzai", "kimono", etc).

This is going to be a "serious" projest, involving writing/reading files (dictionary), displaying rich graphics (I am on a zero budget, so do not expect anything too advanced), music & sounds.

I am treating this project as a prototype for my future iOS development process, and will be testing out various techniques and approaches to see what works and what doesn't.  I plan to finish with the game by the end of the week, and will post various details and follow up next Sunday.