What's planned for this week (8/30/20)
I’ve had a lot of things on my plate lately, so it’s been rather busy and I haven’t been able to do as much programming and other tasks as I’d like. Hopefully, with some things out of the way, this week will give me more time to get some stuff done.
WonderSwan and WonderWitch
I just posted an article about using text colors on the WonderWitch. This will probably be the only WonderWitch content for the week, unless I find some extra time and inspiration. The examples are up on Github. I’m not sure what the next topic is going to be, but hopefully something a little more complicated. The end goal of all of this is to make a simple game, but that will probably take some time. I’ll likely start to look at actually drawing images to the screen.
React Native
I’ve continued to work on my first app using React Native. In general, I’m enjoying it more than I did my time developing on stock Android. It’s nice to be able to leverage my existing knowledge of React to quickly create a relatively functional app in not a terribly long amount of time. The repo for this is private, but once I finish up the work on it, I’ll make it public and probably try to get the application on the Play Store (for free). It’s a round timer for working out, which I decided to develop specifically for when I do kickboxing workouts with the heavy bag.
Right now, the actual timer functionality works pretty well, but the user interface is still rather ugly (in my opinion), so I’d like to take some time to clean that up, and then I still need to add sounds to the application. Once this is done, I had planned to take this work and then build a “deluxe” version of the app, which was my original vision for this project, that has more features and is more in line with what I actually need for my workouts. The deluxe version will probably take a while, but before that’s done, I’ll open up the repo and maybe write an article or two about using React Native with Android.
My plan is to add the actual sounds to the app this week and polish it up, ideally by the middle of the week.
React and Gatsby
I’ve been working on a website to tie in with my new YouTube channel to talk about various gaming topics. I actually haven’t made a ton of progress on this just yet, but much like this blog, it’s going to be built on top of Gatsby, albeit from a more basic starter rather than the blog starter. This means I’ll be writing more of my own React code for it. This project will serve two purposes though - I want to write a beginners guide to working in React, and I’d like to use Gatsby as the basis for that, as I feel it’s a bit easier than having someone setup webpack or something similar. If I manage to finish up my work on the React Native app, then I’ll probably spend a chunk of the last half of the week working on this.
Unity
It’s been a little while since I’ve touched Unity, but I have some ideas floating around for a few different simple games that I’d like to try out. I doubt I’ll actually get to writing any code for this within the week, but I’d like to at least start some sprite work.
Japanese
I had a Japanese lesson the other day, and have another one tonight. The JLPT was cancelled for 2020 (to my knowledge, anyway), so my goal of taking the N3 by December will just have to wait another year. That’s probably not a bad thing, as I’m still pretty rough around the edges on a lot of grammar points and I can always use more vocabulary. Regardless, one of my desires to help motivate me to actually use the vocabulary is to start writing about grammar topics. I’m uncertain if I’d do that on this blog or another blog, but it’s in the pipeline. Similarly, I’ve been planning to start on a flash card application for phones once I finished up the round timer app. This will probably come before the deluxe version of that app.
This Blog
As of this post, I’ve made the repo for this blog public on Github, in case there’s any interest in looking at the modifications I’ve done to it (not that there are many).
That’s all I have on my mind for this week. It’s probably more than I’ll actually have time to do, but at least I’ll be busy.