A quiet week

I’ve not made much progress this week, but there’s always weeks like this. I’ve had an offer to make icons for the inventory, and so I need to look into how I can sort out the UI so that I can add icons.

Kotlin itself doesn’t seem particularly suited to web page development directly – I can make a page with things in it, but it’s a bit painful to make a nice UI and I’ll be constantly reinventing the wheel.

Instead I think I’ll try to use an established framework. I’m going to start with ReactJS – this is a well known framework and while I’m not familiar at all with it, this is a good opportunity to learn.

React seems particularly well suited as it is focused on UIs and clean representations of data. In my game, I have Kotlin to do the hard work of processing the game state and providing a new one, and so this seems like it would be the right thing to have a specialist language for the interface, which is specific to the Javascript. If I were to write another interface for another platform, the chances are I’d need to rewrite everything anyway – what works for a web page does not necesarily work for a standalone application or for a mobile application.

So the next steps here are to work out how to make a React application, and then work out how to integrate my existing Kotlin into it. Part of this might be very simple – all I need from the Kotlin is to translate the game state into something that react can read. However, since I have never tried to use React, I expect some teething problems! We’ll see where we go over the next week or two.

With a bit of luck this will give me something I can actually put on this site and show the current state of the game.


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