Galaxy Defense

{
  "id": "galaxy-defense",
  "title": "Galaxy Defense",
  "status": "archived",
  "year": 2020,
  "category": "game",
  "role": "solo",
  "summary": "A space shooter built in block code in high school. 790 lines, an economy, and a boss fight, with no arrays or classes available.",
  "summary_plain": "A game I built in high school using drag-and-drop coding blocks. It has a shop, upgrades, a boss, and a teleport ability, all made without the normal tools programmers use to keep code organised.",
  "stack": [
    "JavaScript",
    "Code.org Game Lab",
    "Blockly",
    "Canvas"
  ],
  "metrics": {
    "lines_of_generated_js": "790",
    "sprites_placed_by_hand": "17",
    "arrays_available": "0"
  },
  "links": {
    "play": "https://portfolio.dylansg0318.workers.dev/play/galaxy-defense"
  },
  "problem": "The assignment was a game in Code.org's Game Lab, Blockly blocks that generate JavaScript, aimed at people who've never programmed. You get global variables, one draw loop, and sprites you place by hand. You don't get arrays you can loop over, classes, collections, or any way to make one thing and stamp out fifty of it. Most projects that come out of it are one mechanic wide, because anything bigger costs linearly more typing.",
  "unique": "I built a full arcade game inside that ceiling anyway — five attackers, three destructible bases with eight damage states each, a two-hit boss, a bomb pickup, a charge-based teleport and a points shop — by paying for the repetition instead of fighting it. Every alien-versus-projectile pair is written out by hand because there was no loop to put it in. The projectile system cycles three sprite slots with a counter because there was no array to push into. The judgement wasn't any one mechanic, it was deciding which constraints to route around and which to just pay for in volume.",
  "ai": "None. This predates all of it. It was written in 2020, by hand, in a browser block editor. The only AI involvement is the port on this page: I asked Claude Code to move the original logic onto a plain canvas so it runs here without Code.org's runtime, and reviewed the result against the original line by line. Two things were changed on purpose instead of reproduced, both listed below.",
  "learned": [
    "The shape of your code is set by what your language refuses to give you. Without arrays, every \"for each alien\" became a paragraph of near-identical if-statements, and that's exactly why a loop and a collection feel valuable instead of academic.",
    "Game state is the hard part, not rendering. The bugs that made it to the end were all state bugs — a base flickering to the wrong damage sprite, a boss whose health reset in the wrong branch — not drawing bugs.",
    "A shop turns a score into a decision. Prices changed the game from \"don't die\" into \"is a bomb worth twenty points right now\", which is the whole difference between a score counter and an economy."
  ],
  "cover": {
    "url": "https://portfolio.dylansg0318.workers.dev/_astro/cover.CrQAW241.png",
    "width": 1203,
    "height": 1203,
    "alt": "Galaxy Defense running: the player's ship at the bottom, two green aliens descending, three green bunkers, and the lives, points, bombs and FTL readouts."
  },
  "page": "https://portfolio.dylansg0318.workers.dev/projects/galaxy-defense"
}

{
  "problem": "The assignment was a game in Code.org's Game Lab, Blockly blocks that generate JavaScript, aimed at people who've never programmed. You get global variables, one draw loop, and sprites you place by hand. You don't get arrays you can loop over, classes, collections, or any way to make one thing and stamp out fifty of it. Most projects that come out of it are one mechanic wide, because anything bigger costs linearly more typing.",
  "unique": "I built a full arcade game inside that ceiling anyway — five attackers, three destructible bases with eight damage states each, a two-hit boss, a bomb pickup, a charge-based teleport and a points shop — by paying for the repetition instead of fighting it. Every alien-versus-projectile pair is written out by hand because there was no loop to put it in. The projectile system cycles three sprite slots with a counter because there was no array to push into. The judgement wasn't any one mechanic, it was deciding which constraints to route around and which to just pay for in volume.",
  "ai": "None. This predates all of it. It was written in 2020, by hand, in a browser block editor. The only AI involvement is the port on this page: I asked Claude Code to move the original logic onto a plain canvas so it runs here without Code.org's runtime, and reviewed the result against the original line by line. Two things were changed on purpose instead of reproduced, both listed below.",
  "page": "https://portfolio.dylansg0318.workers.dev/projects/galaxy-defense"
}

{
  "learned": [
    "The shape of your code is set by what your language refuses to give you. Without arrays, every \"for each alien\" became a paragraph of near-identical if-statements, and that's exactly why a loop and a collection feel valuable instead of academic.",
    "Game state is the hard part, not rendering. The bugs that made it to the end were all state bugs — a base flickering to the wrong damage sprite, a boss whose health reset in the wrong branch — not drawing bugs.",
    "A shop turns a score into a decision. Prices changed the game from \"don't die\" into \"is a bomb worth twenty points right now\", which is the whole difference between a score counter and an economy."
  ],
  "page": "https://portfolio.dylansg0318.workers.dev/projects/galaxy-defense"
}