So the thing about making things mobile responsive is that it’s a user interface and user experience issue. It’s not a game issue. It’s not something I can fix by tweaking the PHP function, it’s not something I can fix by rewriting some logic.

What is it? It’s finicky, that’s what it is.

Obviously, I should have done a mobile-first design. I always tell myself I’ll just throw the website together right quick and then if I feel like it, I’ll go back and make the site mobile responsive. And basically I never do that. Although I did follow that idea when I put together the latest version of juliemartin.org, but that was yonks ago and it’s also not a slick-looking site. Look, website design has never been my forte. I can do it, I can do all the things, but it’s a bit tedious and it’s a bit boring for me.

It’s funny how I’ve changed over the years. Literally 20 years ago, there was nothing I loved more than playing with website design and using CSS and little snippets of JavaScript to change the look of my websites. And now it’s like… that’s not challenging enough. It’s just finicky enough to annoy me to mean I don’t really have mastery over it and that it’s not easy, but it’s not like it’s difficult to get things to look the way I want them to. (Note: it is still challenging to get things to look pretty, but that’s a whole other failing of mine.)

I’ve set next Saturday as the tentative date when I’ll launch patch 0.3.0a, which would include mobile responsiveness. I started tinkering with it around 3:30am this morning, like 12 hours ago, gave it an hour and was relatively satisfied with what I’d accomplished. But I’m not looking forward to the rest of the work. The <div>s related to the questions being correct or incorrect, or getting a fish or not, or finding food or not, all of those are annoyingly tricky as it is, so I do not relish the thought of trying to make them responsive. I guess we’ll see how finicky it is, eh?

Following up on my previous entry, I also started trying to code a 1% chance of a fun and random thing that happens, but I’m stuck, which is infuriating. Errors crop up everywhere! But why? I may have to shelve that ’till 0.3.1a, along with another 100 questions or so.

Finally, I wrote up an article at DEV about my experiences while writing the game and how you should just do the thing. I didn’t have everything planned out when I started and I still don’t know a ton of things and yet… here I am. Doing the thing. Writing the game. Learning things.

And on that note, I should probably go back to my CSS…