u/RobGoLaing

As part of my learning exercises on how to make device agnostic "push images from one div to another using plain vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript", I've completed The Shooting Party, a game designed by John Kean.

This is about 12th contemporary solitaire card game I've translated into JavaScript, taking a bit more time to learn good practices of unit testing, modularization etc and writing notes for my future self and anyone else interested with links at the bottom of my home page.

I'll now start the process again of applying for Google Adsens approval. Last time I got rejected because I still had links to more ambitious "human vs AI" games which turned into a lesson why you have to spend billions on datacentres instead of just using a $5/month hosting service. My site got "rejected for being unresponsive" since the AI player was way too slow at figure out moves. I've now removed all those links so hopefully Google will ignore them.

Limiting my ambitions to just solitaire card games has made things way more manageable since just focusing on contemporary web app stuff is hard enough, and its brought the added bonus of introducing me to contemporary solitaire card game design.

As a believer in "the best way to learn is to teach", I've started writing articles on various aspects of JavasScript as I learn by writing some games.

Most of my notes are still fairly rough, but one that's "done" is on object literals based on stuff I've learnt as I've gone along.

A problem I've found learning JavaScript is most of the online info seems to be out of date, so I've found I've had to learn by doing. A big help as been using Jasmine to discover how things work by writing tests.

I've just finished Club Fight, part of a series of games I've done as a learning exercise in "how to push images between boxes using plain vanilla CSS and JavaScript usable with a mouse or smartphone".

Club Fight won the 2023 Traditional Deck Game Design Contest for its creator D. "UberDante" Teuber.

My web adaption posed a bit of a UI challenge for me since a card can be used in up to six potential ways. I did this by creating six boxes for a player to push the card they desire to play into (I think this is called worker placement in contemporary game jargon).

I find my design fairly intuitive, but would love to hear if other people find it easy to use.

The growing list of games I've done is on my home page.

Warning: I have applied for Google Ads to no avail so far ("Site down or unavailable" was the last response, I think because I had some attempts at 2-player as in human vs AI which I discovered the hard way take ages with a cheap hosting service. I forgot to delete them entirely besides removing links from the home page). Hopefully the simpler, solitaire games work fine.

This is a solitaire card game designed by Jim Owen which I stumbled on courtesy of a YouTube video.

It's one of several solitaire card or dice games I've coded browser-based versions for as learning exercises in contemporary CSS and JavaScript, using pointer instead of mouse events etc.

I've found it lots of fun, and hopefully easy for others to use since I've avoided pop up screens etc which legacy frameworks like React seem to encourage.

The full list of games I've done so far are on my home page.

I've refactored Card Capture, originally one of my first attempts to create browser-based games using pointer rather than mouse events so it works on a smartphone in landscape or portrait.

Quite a few Aha! moments here. For starters, I didn't think of people moving several cards with several fingers at a time, so that was sorted.

I'm gradually getting a framework together to create games whereby one moves images from one grid cell to another using plain vanilla Javascript and CSS. Besides learning coding, it's been quite an education in contemporary game design, of which Lucas Gentry's Card Capture is a nice example, simplifying the currently popular deck building mechanism down to a game playable with a standard deck of cards.

The full list of games as I go through this exercise are on my home page.

I've done a web-based version of solitaire card game The Bogey.

It's one of several relatively simple solitaire games I've done (here's the full list) to learn "contemporary" CSS and JavaScript. I've been finding it a very fun and educational exercise.

My goal has been to created browser based games that are mobile friendly. No mouse required. (Using JavaScript's pointer rather than mouse events is surprisingly badly documented, and I've had to hack my own homebrew techniques together).

Another challenge has been making the games work in both portrait and landscape mode, but I'm gradually figuring it out.

I've done a web-based version of solitaire card game The Bogey.

It's one of several relatively simple solitaire games I've done (here's the full list) to learn "contemporary" CSS and JavaScript. I've been finding it a very fun and educational exercise.

My goal has been to created browser based games that are mobile friendly. No mouse required. (Using JavaScript's pointer rather than mouse events is surprisingly badly documented, and I've had to hack my own homebrew techniques together).

Another challenge has been making the games work in both portrait and landscape mode, but I'm gradually figuring it out.

I'd thinking of building myself a RISC-V single board computer, but have very little experience.

From Googling, I'm thinking of ordering this Bananapi BPI-F3 from Aliexpress (I'm based in Berlin), but not sure if that's a good deal.

I've been reading the docs and I'm a bit confused about whether to also order a LPDDR4X 16GB RAM chip (I haven't dabbled with hardware for years, so only learnt today what an SBC is), and whether it would be worth getting a MicroSD bigger than 8GB since it's only needed to burn the BIOS on as far as I know.

My plan is to install Gentoo Linux once I've got something bootable.

Is this a good choice or not?

I've refactored the first game I did a few weeks ago, Scoundrel. My goal was to figure out "mobile first" (ie just finger, no mouse or keyboard required) and just plain vanilla JavaScript, no npm anything.

I only just figured out the basic CSS structure to size things landscape or portrait. Easy when you know how, but I've found diving in and writing games the only way to figure these things out.

Though Scoundrel is designed for standard playing cards, I customized the art for the fun of it. I've done the same for Regicide.

The UI seems simple and intuitive to me, but it would be good to hear from blind-testers.

Regicide is one of about six and growing solitaire games I've done as a learning exercise in "mobile first", ie using JavaScript's pointer events to drag 'n drop cards or dice rather than mouse or touch events. The full and hopefull growing list is on my homepage https://newsgames.co.za

As a learning exercise I've put up Bowling Solitaire which I found in Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games which was published in the sixties.

It started out with me trying to figure out how to do "mobile first" games where you can push images around with your finger, and I ended up having to device my own hack for this since all the stuff Google brought up was kinda legacy.

This is now about the sixth solitaire game I've done, gradually refining my own framework which uses no third-party libraries, just plain-vanilla JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

Anyways, I've been finding this very fun and educational, and find my own homebrew UI fairly intuitive, but would be nice to hear if other people find the game easy to learn and play. My full (and growing) list of games is on the homepage.