15 Puzzle

This project turned out to be a huge improvement compared to the previous game. Writing the code turned out to be fairly easy, as there were surprisingly few bugs. I am very happy with the color scheme used in this project (although the color used for the level select buttons is a little bit strange). Attempting to create a smooth level progression was the most difficult thing to do by far. The 15 puzzle is inherently difficult, so it is hard to ease the player into wrapping their mind around how the puzzle functions.

I am very proud of the music used in this project. This was my first attempt at composing background music for a game. It took a while to come up with an instrument and a chord progression that set the proper mood for the game, but in the end I feel I settled on something that did the job extremely well. However, one thing that players may notice is that the song does not loop seamlessly. Because of the way that JavaScript handles playing audio files, simply using the built in loop property does not create a perfect loop. I decided that this problem was small enough to be ignored for the time being, however I plan to do further research on this problem shortly after this website is released.

8/8/22: Added Mobile Support

Adding mobile support took a lot longer than first anticipated, but was a good learning experience nonetheless. I found that there seemed to be three steps to adding support for small devices. The first step is pretty obvious, but it is to add touch controls. This was pretty easy and only added about 40 lines of code. The next step is to come up with a way that the game can resize to fit on any screen size. It is good practice to do this when designing the original game anyways, but in my case I had designed the game to fit only in a 800 x 600 window. I had done this because I was unsure what adding mobile support would entail, so I left the task to be done after I had finished the main game. In the future I will make sure to design my code in a way that I can easily adjust the content to fit different resolutions. I ended up having to rewrite my CSS twice, but in the end it was worth it because I believe I have come up with a product that looks good on small screens. The last step is to fix the many bugs and quirks that come with mobile support. Once again, an experienced programmer would likely be aware of these issues and write their code in a way that accounts for most of these problems ahead of time, but simply had no idea there would be so many issues to account for. The vast majority of these issues had to do with sound and happened on IOS devices. The biggest issue I encountered with IOS devices is that playing multiple sounds back to back would cause the game to freeze. I have seen many games play several sounds at once without any issues so I am sure that there is a better solution, but I solved this problem by simply not playing as many sounds on mobile (mainly just disabling the swiping sound, as that is played the most frequently). All things considered, I am more than happy with how this game came out and I am very satisfied to now call this project finished.