Coral reef simulator

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  Landing Page

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  Submarine View

I like building physics sandbox games. I love the more complex behaviors that emerge from a basic set of well-balanced rules, and being a developer allows me to play even more intimately with fine-tuning those rules. In my free time I help coach a club of middle school kids here in rural Iowa. We're competing in the FIRST LEGO League program which, this year, has been focused on problems that researchers have when exploring or studying underwater environments. Our kids have been very interested in coral reefs but we realize that none of the kids have actually seen any coral, or have any first-hand knowledge about coral. So that's where our problem is: No first-hand experience with coral or the problems that the organism is facing. Then I got the email about the Game Builder Challenge and a lightbulb turned on.

The Coral Reef Simulator is a game with a very simple set of rules that then run in a sort of game-of-life mode, simulating coral growth. The rules include things to encourage growth and also discourage it. You get to directly interact with the growth, but only after you answer trivia questions about coral, which encourages research on the subject. This game is aimed at kids.

I built the proof of concept of the game pretty quickly, over 48 hours on a weekend. I downloaded VS Code on a home Linux laptop, installed the Amazon Q extension and github extensions and went to town. Q was able to get the game started very quickly, in particular the port-hole design was entirely Q's.

But Q dropped the ball on the graphics and motion controls. The math just wasn't quite right, though it was close. I spent a while trying to tweak it, but ultimately scrapped the math Q came up with and re-programmed it by hand. I wonder how close my final solution was to the original? I'm proud of my solution though, it makes sense to me and I think it's fast.

I learned that Q is great for small tweaks, UI changes, greenfield development, but not to be completely relied on when it gets to the hard logic.

I have a long list of features to add, and we'll see how far I get by the submission deadline. I just added momentum for the sub controls that made it feel 100% cooler. I really want to expand on the game-of-life logic.

Built With

• javascript
• q
• s3