Inspiration

This project was mainly inspired by the nature of the hackathon in general. We wanted to make something silly, and we believe that's what we did. Each member created four HTML pages that served as 'levels'. Each level had to test the player's wits. One of the levels requires the player to view the page source code!!!

Challenges

Since this project was 'modular' in a sense, sticking each page together in a chronological order served as a bit of a challenge. Razvan ordered the levels really well by writing them on paper first.

Heroku wasn't really designed for HTML applications, so this posed a challenge. What Rakha did was he added an index.php file that in essence tricked Heroku to thinking that the app was a PHP application.

Another challenge was that the .html pages were named in numerical order (e.g. 1.html, 2.html, etc). As we didn't want the player to change the level names by typing in the navbar, our very last step was renaming each page by applying an MD5 hash to their filenames, so they can avoid cheating. (e.g. 2.html is now c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c.html)

Overall, we would say branching and merging were quite challenging as sometimes we'd forget to pull from the master branch from time to time before working on our own local copy. We overcame this challenge by having a Zoom call active during the entire hackathon to notify each other regarding which branch to pull/work on.

What we learned

We had fun making this project. We learned we didn't require a sophisticated tech stack to simply make a project 'for fun'. Our technologies used were trivial in a sense, but in retrospect, we had a great time throughout.

Additionally, we understood the importance of branching in version control as we only wanted the main copy of the work (i.e. master branch) to be the working copy. No one wants their main copy to not be working.

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