Lemonade Stand

Lemonade Stand is a clone of the classic Apple IIE game of the same name. It’s a single page application, built using Javascript’s fetch command to asynchronously communicate with an API built in Ruby on Rails.

Planning

I planned for this project by playing the original game available through online emulators several times. I read a strategy guide for a more sophisticated version of Lemonade Stand that discussed ways to optimize your game inputs based on the randomized weather. I also found a git repository of the code for the original game in BASIC and read through it to get an idea of how to generate the logic for the game.

I designed my back-end to comply with the project requirements. I decided to persist individual Games and Days to the API so that in future versions of the game, there could be a high score leaderboard that players could add their name to and so I could aggregate data to increase difficulty based on results that players had saved.

Challenges

This project was pretty straightforward. I struggled a little bit with using Netflix’s Fast JSON Api gem to serialize API data. My introduction to the gem had proposed including the collection of objects in a has_many relationship on the parent by passing options to include that collection to the new instance of the serializer. I had better results including :days as an attribute in the Games serializer and then specifiying which serializer the gem should use when including the day attributes.

Lessons

This project helped me grasp the specifics of object-oriented programming in Javascript.