BreadCrumbs

Inspiration

This project was inspired by Langton's Ant, an automaton with simple rules that nonetheless generates rich, complex patterns, going as far as to be Turing-complete.

What it does

Breadcrumbs is a game taking place on a rectangular grid. The objective of this game is to help our ant reach the green tile in the bottom right. When the ant steps on a white tile, it will move forward and turn right; on grey, it will turn left. However, if it steps on a red tile, it will perish.

How we built it

Started off with webpack, which takes our modules and packages them into 4 static assets for our webpage to load.
Decided to use Javascript, HTML and CSS as they are the fundamental building blocks for a good webpage.
Used the React library to manage local state and easily update and mount our data to the webpage.
Included LocalStorage as the high score was needed to remember previous scores on the client-side to make it more interactive.

Challenges we ran into

Whenever the ant reached the end of the matrix (pre-set table size) it would leave the bounds of the matrix. Fixed by having the ant "bounce" off of the edge.
The user would be able to modify the board while the game was running. Fixed with a boolean acting as a lock variable. Technically you can still modify the board after a "step" which can still produce unexpected results.
Refactoring code base for readability and following guidelines

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Store information on the client side
Turn the direction of the ant as it detects new tiles.
Added actions to all the buttons.
Ability to toggle tiles from white/black
Combine data and visualization to create an interactive game with win conditions.