Two steps forward, Four steps backwards 😭

Firstly, I’ve fixed the gsap animations not working. This happened because last time I renamed all the color state into chessboardColor. Due to this the gsap backgroundColor css property turned into backgroundchessboardColor. Ig the lesson here is think before using change all occurences feature in vscode.

The sidebar now changes. If puzzle hasn’t started then it’s the same old ui. If the puzzle starts the level btns disappear along with start puzzle button. If user makes incorrect move the sidebar show retry puzzle button and if the puzzle is completed successfully then next puzzle button shows up. One thing I learned here is making one button use different className, onClick handler and text easily by storing all data in object.

The retry and completed onClick function looks empty. So, I decided to work on the retry puzzle button functionality. To make the functionality work I imported the resetBoard function from chessboard context. Calling the function directly didn’t work because setState function doesn’t apparently update if the value is same. I fixed that by passing {retryLevel: true} or false to the function. After doing this the first opponent move did break and I did fix it but I think with bad code. Looking at the code now I’ve been calling resetting the board and setting default position using the chessboardColor seems wrong.

So, then I started cleaning the code. I guess I was correct and things needed to change. I would say these are mostly small changes and don’t need explanation but it seems that the chessboardColor had an actually bug and it took my soul away trying to fix that 😭 . So, the opponent move was capturing it’s own piece meaning that the piece which moved at the beginning would automatically disappear. This was happening because the moveOpponentPiece function ran before the chessboardColor could change when the puzzle is first started. To fix this I had used useEffect hook with chessboardColor in the dependency array to reset the board. But only works if I have the black pieces. If I have the white pieces the chessboardColor doesn’t update because useState doesn’t update when the value is same. The value is white at first because of the default position set when puzzle hasn’t started. I don’t even know how to explain the fix i used. I just chained state updates from file to file to have colorUpdated state value updated in chessboard context.jsx. Basically I had a rough time fixing the resetBoard function running before chessboard color was updated. This time even pen and paper also couldn’t help me solve this 😭 😭 but it did help me to understand the problem on a deeper level.

I tried adding next puzzle button functionality. “I tried” 😭 cuz I couldn’t get it to work and on top of that when I tested the retry button it didn’t work. Don’t know how but the retry button also broke. Now, I’m taking a huge decision again. I think some of the problems can be reduced if the chessboard wasn’t a single component that works on both puzzle page and vision page. I think I was too ambitious but now seeing these issues I think it’s better for me to have to separate chessboard components. This might not be the best practice, but this will probably make my life easier.

I just read the “Devlogs that get noticed” in the resources page and I think I should make my devlogs a little shorter. I said this in one of my previous blocks as well, but it seems that I am explaining too much. So let’s see what will happen tomorrow. Okay bieeee….