Developer vs. Dev Gods

Inspiration

When I first heard about the challenge I brainstormed a lot trying to come up with ideas for what kind of game to make. Finally I thought, what about a game about making a game! So I decided to make it and that way I can use my process and struggles as inspiration for the game!

What it does

In this game, the player has dialogue with the Dev Gods and is trying to battle out different scenarios that come up during game development. The game play is based on dice with different powered faces. The player uses the dice to attack, heal or defend against the "monsters". When the player moves to the next level, they are given the choice of upgrading their dice to have more powerful abilities or the option of obtaining additional dice.

How we built it

Once I had decided on a concept, I used Amazon Q to help me brainstorm ideas on the some quirky scenarios we as developers might face. In terms of the code itself, I tried to use Amazon Q Developer as much as I could to see just how powerful it could be. I set it up inside of VS Code and was able to use the /dev command to ask it to implement various features of the game. I found that what worked best was to break down features into smaller tasks and then ask Amazon Q to implement these smaller steps. For example, when implementing the monster functionality, I first asked it to create one monster. Once that functionality was working, I asked it to refactor the code to implement the monster as an object to allow more monsters to be created. For the deployment I used AWS Amplify. Overall it was a very interesting experience and I learned a lot while having fun!

Challenges we ran into

As more of a back end developer myself, the styling of the front end components was what the most frustrating part, because who likes CSS anyway?! :) There's definitely some more refinements that could be made for the user interface. As far as Amazon Q Developer challenges go, sometimes it would update an implementation and leave old references which would break the javascript. However, I would simply ask it to fix it and for the most part it was able to fix the issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am really proud of the concept that I came up with. It was really fun to come up with ideas for the various levels and see them come to life.

What we learned

I learned so much! I had dabbled in coding using AI but this was my first time actually using it for a full fledged project. I definitely see that it can be a very powerful tool and I want to continue leveraging it in the future.