Peekaboo Pairs

A fun project to learn front end web development by a backend developer. Motivation was to develop something that my kid enjoys playing.

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Inspiration

When I came across AWS Game Builder Challenge, I had multiple goals in mind with this, with the obvious being the prize money, the more realistic one being - see how far I can get to with the latest stack of front end technologies in developing a complete solution. I have been a backend developer for my entire engineering career working on C, C++, Python, Perl, Ruby. My indulgence in front end development is minimal and probably a decade old tinkering something with jQuery and primitive HTML, CSS. The other tangetial goal I had is to develop something that my kid has fun playing with.

My initial attempt for is a multi-player board game, spent few days on it, even though I am using the Code generation tools like Amazon Q, ChatGPT, Google AI Studio the sorts of problems I am encountering weren't easy to solve, I was not able to get to a workable solution with help of online documentation and LLMs, I realized it would require lot more domain expertise to proceed further with that, which I don't have at the moment, so I gave up on this challenge.

With 4 days left in the competition, I didn't want to feel defeated in this, so I came back to Amazon Q this time right from the beginning in terms of what game that I could try for this and picking a simpler game which has minimal components and I went more methodical with this one, starting with minimal skeleton and slowly adding features with increasing complexity, so that I can debug and potential fix thigns on the way. Fortunately, this approach worked, I am amazed at LLMs(in this specific scenario with Amazon Q) capability to writing code that helps in full end to end development.

What it does

A fun game engaging that teases with memory for all ages

How we built it

  • Amazon Q as part of VS Code for ideation, design & development
  • Amazon Amplify to host the game
  • Amazon DynamoDB to store highest score

Challenges we ran into

  • Completely new to frontend technologies, some of the errors that I ran into were difficult to debug, luckily Amazon Q did a pretty good job of listing multiple possibilities.
  • Initially started with a multi-player board game that is more complex but I couldn't make good progress on that because of the lack of domain expertise in front end development, so I had to switch to a much simpler game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Proud to have finished this starting from scratch in 3 days, I have never done a front end project end to end.

What we learned

  • Learned little bit more about the latest technology stack in front end world
  • Learned how to use Generative AI for software development at all phases.

What's next for Peekaboo Pairs

Add more interesting features:

  • Personalized score with user tracking
  • Introduce more categories for the game rather than just animal emojis
  • Add different levels of difficulty
    • Bigger board
    • Varying background colors for the cards
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