As I did last year, I will once again be participating in Devember, and once again I will be doing game development. Huzzah! I had an absolute blast doing this last year, and I’m stoked to participate once again and see what all of the other Devember people will be working on.

In case you’re not in the know, Devember is devoted to the idea put forth by code.org that everyone should have the opportunity to learn computer science. In today’s society, computers are everywhere; they are on our desks at work, in our hands during the day in the form of phones and tablets, and they’re even sitting in our entertainment system. Learning computer science should be an important part of everyone’s education.

Code.org organizes an annual Hour of Code event, and Devember takes it one step (or 30 steps, I guess) further. Instead of coding for an hour, you devote a minimum of one hour every day for the entire month of December coding. At the end of every day you make the code that you wrote that day publicly available and write a public development log about what you have done.

Following the simple rules of Devember, my contract with myself (and all of you following along):

I, Terence Martin, will participate to the next Devember. My Devember will be game development in TypeScript. I promise I will program for my Devember for at least an hour, every day of the next December. I will also write a daily public devlog and will make the produced code publicly available on the internet. No matter what, I will keep my promise.

When I participated last year, it was with the intention of getting back in game development again as I used to do in the past. I finished the tasks that I set out for myself, and (with the exception of a couple of extremely busy months near the end of this year) also managed to fulfill my other non-devember related goal of constant blog updates with progress.

This year I will be similarly working on a game clone in TypeScript, using the latest version of the final engine that I came up with as part of last year, which I call ts-game-engine. This time around the game clone will be based on a game by Soleau Software called Bolo Ball. Over the course of the last year I have dropped away from using WebStorm in favor of Sublime Text, which I find exceedingly more pleasing to work with. This year’s game suggestion actually came from a new friend I made this year on the official support forums, in fact.

Also continuing the tradition of “clever” game names, my version of the game is called A-Maze-Balls, which most will notice is not really clever at all, although somewhat descriptive. I’m not aiming for an exact remake by any stretch, but instead something that following a similar design. Depending on progress through Devember I may end up adding in some extra ideas for additional features.

Similar to last year, the code for this project will be hosted at Gitlab, and is available at: https://gitlab.com/OdatNurd/devember-2016/tree/master. Daily updates will be made here on the Bloggity in the Devember 2016 category.