Case Clicker

Purpose

I wanted to challenge myself in creating a client-side endless clicker game with the usage of Framer Motion animations.

Lore

I was learning how React works during this summer period when a thought came across my head at the time: “Can I make a clicker game in one month before my friends birthday?” So I went about developing this ambitious project and the overall goals I wanted to achieve in this time frame.

I came to the conclusion that I wanted:

• A picture of my friend to click on
• An emoji reaction waterfall similar to Instagram in livestreams
• Perks to help the user build to something
• Satisfying animations

I like to think that in the time frame I set myself for that I achieved all of these. I did have some other ideas I wanted to add but I knew for my minimum viable product (MVP) that it needed to be more digestible. Overall I am really impressed with what I created and it was a fun project to learn React the hard way.

Challenges

It goes without saying that learning React was a challenge during this time but I think a particular thing that stumped me was Hooks. At a surface are built-in React tools to help manage state and all that gross stuff. I felt really accomplished when it clicked how useState and useEffect works, especially when combining these two in order to create my own custom Hook. These were some fun challenges I faced and I think the best part of this project was that it was a gift which motivates me to build more radical things for people.

Some other minor challenges I faced were:

• The logic of a universal timer to handle: affection meter, perk countdown, and the literal timer
• The logic of the reaction waterfall with the emojis was trick. The way I implemented this was to push a new emoji into a vector and have that animate for a short time. I feel like there might be a better solution upon further consideration.
• How state interacts with setTimeout() in JavaScript. (It did not help that I was stubborn enough to try and create my own timer without too much research)