Devlog #08

Development has really slowed down now that I am entering the thick of it at school. Regardless, over the past two weekends, I finished Signal Jam and started the fourth (and final) game before shipping, The Outsider!

Completed Work: Signal Jam

Finishing this up was quick and smooth. I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but it was fast enough that I decided to wait until completing the idea I had sitting in the back of my mind (The Outsider) before posting another devlog.

I reused the Results screen code from the previous games, tweaked the content to be specific to the game, and added a few extra if statements since this game has more win conditions. After playtesting, I made some small polish changes and committed everything.

Completed Work: The Outsider

This game’s flow was inspired by Chameleon.  I went in expecting it to make a quick reskin of Imposter with a new word grid feature, but building that grid took more time than planned. Getting the grid to look good on both mobile and desktop was tricky. I eventually decided to lock mobile players into landscape mode so the grid would have more space and be easier to see when everyone’s looking at the same screen. Then, I had to figure out wrapping and line break issues to ensure the words were consistently displayed neatly.

One technical highlight I would like to share is that, originally, I thought about storing the selected word index using a data-selected-index attribute on the grid container, but since attributes only store strings, handling 0 (the first cell index) would have required extra checks to avoid false negatives. Instead, I used a closure variable (selectedIndex) inside the function that built the word grid. This clean solution enables it to reset automatically each time the grid renders, which also clears the previous selection. 

Next Steps:

The project is basically ready to ship! I’ll make one more devlog to add some localStorage features and wrap things up before release. 

Thanks for reading!