#api lab

Today we presented our work with the API Lab. Since not everyone was able to show up today I presented a bit more than I had prepared. I found out a bit of last minute that I was to present the introduction as well as Felicia’s example since she wasn’t able to come in. It went okay and I feel like I could get our point across. We presented our idea of prototyping with interactive movement and velocity to see changes in the users behavior towards for example loading screens of pending requests or downloads which might take a bit longer time. 

We had explored different ideas of how to use movement and velocity with this purpose, for example making a small “gaming environment” as I did and interactive clicks that changes the displayed image/environment of some kind. I feel like we worked nice together towards the same goal and the same prototyping idea. That is - to test out interactive movement in a loading screen environment. It was a bit difficult at times to gather the group since we have had a lot of other stuff going on - for example with project 1 etc. The API lab has unfortunately got a bit into the background and we’ve worked with it when we’ve felt like we’ve had the time to do it. I also found the assignment a little bit difficult and confusing at times - it wasn’t really clear in the beginning that we were supposed to use it for prototyping purposes and have that in mind. Fortunately we as a group could use our work and extended examples to explain what purposes they had in a prototyping environment. It was also a bit difficult to get into the API since we didn’t have a lot of programming experience and getting thrown into it is both good and bad. If we could get more isolated time with only this it might have turned out to be easier than I experienced it to be. A shattered mind is not ideal for learning new things and diving deeper into a specific library.

I on my way with my two examples of PixiJS. I found the library hard to work with at first, being difficult to know what to download and how to make it work. Once all that was done, the fun began. It was very nice working with visual 2D “game”-inspired sprites, and it was fun to see how you could code to interact with these sprites with the code.

The first example I did was collecting a bunch of sprites in a “container” that rotates around itself. I chose to not evolve this example since I had found a more interactive example which I wanted to explore more and extend. This is an example of a small cat-sprite that moves accordingly to the key-presses of “up”, “down”, “left”, and “right”. This is a good example to show off how to use PixiJS in basic 2D game development - which I find very interesting and fun.

So far I’ve extended that example to move more intuitively for a gamer who is used to games with these keyboard presses. When you press both up and left for example, the player should move diagonally - not only to either left or up. And when/if the user presses two opposite arrow keys, like up and down for example, these key presses should cancel each other out - making the player not move at all. These are two changes/extensions I’ve made so far. I have in mind to extend it further, maybe having two cats moving synchronously, or having obstacles of some kind.

Today we kicked off the API Lab with sitting with our respective groups, setting up the GitHub repository and choosing a library to work with. My group consists of Myy, Chloé, Felicia, Simon and Benjamin. We have a great dynamic so far, we were effective in choosing a library while Chloé managed to set up a GitHub repository which we all have access to now. We tried it out during the afternoon with me making a standard HTML page in a file called ”index.html” within a folder called ”clara” and committed this to ”master”. When I had done that I pushed it - so it became a part of everyone else’s repository as well.

I feel like it is going to be a slightly steep learning curve (I could be wrong), but I am certain we will make it through and learn a lot during the way. I am happy with the library we choose - Pixi JS. I find this library very interesting and aesthetically pleasing. It looks, at least at first glance, like you can do fun things with this library. I liked the website, it was very user-friendly to me with a clear menu in the top that shows what I as a newcomer to this library want to know more about. It gave relevant information and was easy to understand, even for someone who does not really know what to expect (me).

Something that is made with Pixi JS that looks like fun: