Week 2 of Game Jams

Week 2 has felt a bit slower than week one for some reason. Perhaps this is due to the first week being setup and laying out the ground work so it felt like things were moving very quickly. Week 2 has been full of tough coding problems that took much more time to figure out and resolve. While week 2 was tougher it definitely led to learning more about working as a team.

Refresher for anyone who did not read week 1 Game Jams, I am on a team of 3 for a Flatiron game jams. We decide to make a blackjack application. Using “Deck of Card API http://deckofcardsapi.com/” we have been able to mostly complete a blackjack game.

My most recent task has been to make sure the standButton component in the frontend using JavaScript and React. Yesterday we were able to get the component to compare the hands of the plyer and the dealer and see who actually won! Very exciting to see it work. The next step now is to get the component to register that face cards have a value of 10 and do not cause NaN(Not a number) to show up when comparing scores.

This was a limitation we discovered about the API very recently. All card have a “value” attached in the API and this made it fairly easy to calculate the totals of hands. Issue was that face cards have values like “King” and not a number. I was able to use parseInt() to turn the string of numbers to integers successfully. Then next challenge is getting King, Queen, Jack and Ace to be recognized as numerical values in terms of Blackjack as well