THIS MIGHT BE THE LAST DEVLOG

First I polished the puzzles sidebar. I made the sidebar width to be same as vision page sidebar. Then I changed the level button size as they were too small for larger screens. I also made the level button container scrollable if the level buttons overflow. This took the most time because the whole puzzles sidebar body was overflowing pushing down that start button. I just wanted the sidebar body to not overflow which would make the levels container to be scrollable. The fix at last was using min-height: 0 to the sidebar body. Idk how the min-height: 0 is helping here 😭 .

Next I made the visualization section animation (The last section of the home page) to appear quicker. This was a recommendation from my brother as when scrolling previously the section might seem like it contained nothing until you scroll fully. I faced issued mainly with the section not pinning to the top of screen when trying to move the animation timeline starting point. Also I tried to placing text higher on y axis and animate it coming down with the user scroll which produce the result I was expecting. So, I split the timeline into two. The first one reveals the text and the second one shows a person visualizing. The tex revealing animation ends when the section top hits the top of the screen which makes the section pin to the top exactly how I wanted it to be.

Then I polished vision page sidebar as follows:

• Made the sidebar responsive after user has clicked on start
• Made the sidebar header look better and fix mismatch of padding from body
• Returned to using flex for the attempts and mad them responsive
• Tweaked the options and info as they were looking odd in some screen sizes (mainly the tablet one which looked really bad)

I then copied some of these changes to the puzzles sidebar for maintaining similarity.

Lastly I capped the width of course, puzzles and vision page to 1600px by adding a wrapper element. It acted weird on puzzles and vision page sidebar as there was already a element named wrapper and so I changed the classname to page-wrapper.

Fixing things and some more responsive things

I’ve fixed chessboard displaying multiple selected squares. This happened when user selected a piece and then selected another piece by dragging. The fix was really simple. I just added resetSquares function when piece on drag start.

I’ve also fixed pieces stacking on top of each other if user drags and drops a piece on another piece quickly before the opponents move happens. This was prevented when pieces are moved only by clicking but I forgot to prevent this if pieces were dragged and dropped. I did two things to prevent this:

1. I reduced the time for opponent piece to move after the first move.
2. I disabled the piece from dragging if it wasn’t the player’s turn.

It seems the first fix wasn’t sufficient as it created another bug. So, if user selected a piece by clicking or dragging and then dragged the same piece then the destination squares and captureSquare will just completely disappear. The occurred due to resetSquares function that I had added. I thought for a while and came up with this solution. The resetSquares function only executes if user selects another piece on drag. However the function won’t execute if the selected Piece is being dragged. The selected piece state null at first so resetSquares() won’t also execute if selected piece is null. Now, it works as expected until and unless I find some bugs.

Now returning back to the responsiveness. I fixed the puzzles button to be equal width and height. I had made the level buttons responsive before but they weren’t the same size. I had tried the aspect ratio last time as well but it was breaking the layout. Basically I used aspect ratio, removed the grid templated rows and changed some clamp values. Also I removed the media query below 1440px and integrated it as default css.

After doing that, I started to fix the attempts in in vision sidebar. I thought it would take me two seconds to do it as I just had to apply the puzzle button knowledge here. I thought just doing this will work

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(40px, 1fr));

I was wrong 😭 This worked fine for level buttons cuz the number of buttons were static. Here the attempts squares increases as the user clicks on the chessboard. If there’s only one attempt square then it will take the whole width.

I was stuck after this. I tried different things such as using max-width, trying to add width: fit-content, etc. but nothing worked. At last I thought of reverting back to what the code orginally was which just used flex and flex wrap but coming this far I just used grid and used different values with height to make the attemps square kinda responsive. I still need to use clamp or something to make this look good. Uhhhhhh this is so frustrating… .

I think I’m overexplaining things. I should just simplify down things

This devlog is a short one

I’ve made the vision page responsive for larger screens. Last time I made the page responsive for mobile screens. I made some small changes in puzzles page while doing this for maintaining similar code . I ran into some issues such as css not working due to incorrect nesting and writing the writing the css on wrong file. Also, I removed media query for 1440px as the default css will work between 1024px and 1440px using clamp css functions and by doing that, above 1440px the css will stay the largest clamp value. I think I will do the same in puzzles page as well. 2hrs wen’t so quickly mainly cuz of my stupidity as I broke things that already was working fine. Also, I don’t think I like the mobile responsiveness that much but i don’t think i’ll change it now (or maybe I will).

While writing this devlog I just realize that I’ve make the sidebar responsive after vision page has started. Uhhh i hate responsive design

Changed some puzzles and more responsiveness work

Copied the puzzles page and it’s component’s media query css

So after making puzzles page somewhat responsive last time, the first thing I decided to do after that was copying puzzles page media query css and just paste it in vision page as both of pages are very similar. This made the vision page and it’s components a little responsive.

Puzzle changes

I’ve changed the puzzle from level 12, 23 and 30. The 12 and 23 level had 2 ways to deliver checkmate and only one of them counted as correct. I changed them as user might get frustrated seeing that. My code doesn’t handle that so I just changed them. Level 30 was changed cuz it wasn’t really difficult. I don’t think I’m satisfied with the new level 30 puzzle either.

One issue while polishing signup page

I didn’t want the form to look squished on devices with small vertical screen size. Due to this last time I generally kept things smaller than what I wanted to make sure it looks okay for those devices. To fix that I added min-height to the form-container. It prevented the form from squishing but the form-container was overflowing as the puzzles page has 100dvh. What I wanted was just the form scrolling using overflow: scroll but this probably took me about 20-30 mins to make it work 😭 . I set overflow to scroll to form-container it didn’t work, added it to form which also didn’t work and then I added it to puzzles page. The scroll part was working when I added it on puzzles page but not what I was looking. Then I created a wrapper div to hold the img container and form container hoping now adding overflow:scroll to form container will do the job. After trying all things things I realized that the min-height was set to form container instead of form. The fix was to adding min-height to form and set overflow scroll to form-container. I removed the wrapper div after that as it was unnecessary and also hid the scrollbar that appears in form-container.

Signup and login page polish after that annoying issue

After that annoying issue I’d say things went pretty smoothly. I mainly used clamp as always for making things responsive. And as always it took me longer that expected. After polishing up the signup page I copied the code to login page and just changed signup to login.

Vision page responsive on mobile devices

Making the vision page responsive for mobile device was really similar as polishing signup page. I just used clamp for everything and made sure everything looked good. Now that I think about it i only made the sidebar responsive including the popup menu as only that is displayed on mobile devices and chessboard is hidden. The chessboard is also kinda responsive due to the copy pasting the puzzles page media query css. The making of sidebar responsive was just trying out different sizes and then putting the value into clamp calculator and copy pasting the value.

Now, I’ll work on the vision page responsiveness for bigger devices and then if everything looks great after testing then I’ll ship the project

Made puzzles page responsive and bugs fixes

Puzzles page responsive

Most the time was spent making the puzzles page responsive. As always it took more time than expected. There were many issue that popped up and slowly but surely I fixed them. One of the issues was in bigger mobile screens the sidebar was being squished because the chessboard was getting really big but puzzles page has height of 100dvh as the chesboard in mobile phones is calculated according to width. To fix it I tried adding min-height to the sidebar for not getting squished and height of auto to puzzles page but this broke the sidebar when puzzles is not started cuz there’s no chessboard. The height of sidebar is 100% so due to the parent’s height being auto the sidebar height was about as didn’t fill the whole screen. To fix this I used overflow: scroll to puzzles page and it’s height to 100dvh. Another issue came when trying to make chessboard and sidebar look decent in different laptop sizes. I made it somehow work but using clamp, min-height, max-height, min-width and max width. It was kind of a pain to solve all the issues that came while doing this. That’s why I’ve rushed making the puzzles page responsive. My plan is to come and polish it after I’ve made the course page responsive as well. It shouldn’t be too difficult imo as it’s very similar to puzzles page.

Fixed user being able to drag and drop opponent’s pieces

It was a quite dumb bug. I had prevented this for click to move feature but I didn’t think about it in drag and drop. The fix was quite simple as dnd-kit (npm package) provides a disabled property in useDraggble. I disabled it for the pieces for dragging which had the opposite color of chessboard.

Fix next puzzle button not working on second last level

I didn’t actually know about this bug. A friend of mine told me about this issue while testing the website. After level 29 is completed a state is toggled to true which prevents the next button from not working. The next button is now only supposed to not work after completed the last level. I haven’t used fixed values for fixing this so in future if I decide to add or remove puzzles it shouldn’t break. The fix was a little more complex than I anticipated.

9 days of stardance remain now. So, I have to lock in now. Okay bie

We’re close to the end

First I fixed the buggy dropping piece. I fixed this when I first worked on drag and drop piece feature but I don’t know how it broke again. When trying different things to fix it I tried to move the setIsDragging(false) lower inside dragEnd function below movePiece and capturePiece function calls. Surprisingly it worked 😄.

I fixed light square being dark and vise versa if user had the black pieces. I found out this issue because the coordinates colors were mismatched. So my first intuition was changing the color of coords.jsx. I got really confused as the changes did nothing in the browser. I am so dumb I was changing the vision page chessboard’s coords.jsx instead of puzzles page chessboard’s coords.jsx. It worked but then I realized the coordinates color weren’t wrong square colors were. I undid the changes made to coords.jsx. I also seperated the coords.jsx but adding puzzles and vision in the name. Then I fixed the squares color for black’s board.

I’ve figured out the mobile design for puzzle section. First the idea was that the chessboard and sidebar would be stacked on top of each other. This was the easy route but if I did that then it would add friction to the mobile players as they would have to scroll all the way down to start the puzzles. Then I looked at chess.com and they were doing it really well where only after clicking start puzzle the chessboard will appear. So I removed the chessboard below 425px first and then made the button text, size and gap smaller. I also removed the aspect ratio of 1/1 from the buttons as the buttons were ruining the gaps between them in certain screen sizes.

Now for the first challenge I faced. How do I only make the chessboard appear and disappear when clicking start puzzle only on mobile devices. As I used gsap matchMedia to make the chessboard’s container display none or block according to hasPuzzleStarted for mobile screens.

The chessboardSize is calculated according to chessboard container so that the chessboard is divisible by 4. When first loading the chessboard if the container has display none then the chessboardSize becomes zero and when setting the container to block will only show empty chessboard container without a board. I tried using the autoAlpha property of gsap hoping that it will do that same job as display none but without remove the element. It was making the container invisible but the container would still retain it’s height and width. I was starting to doubt myself here and was thinking to take the easy route but just stacking the board and sidebar vertically.

After thinking for a while I came up with a breakthrough I made the position of chessboard container to absolute and visibility to invisible. Now the chessboard container won’t be visible and won’t take up any space as it is absolute. When the board used absolute position idk why but the board container got so bigger. It also distorted the pieces when puzzle started. To fix it I ran the gsapMatchMedia code only after chessboardSize is calculated which was a great idea. It fixed the board when the puzzle started but when it was hidden it was still large. I just replaced the absolute and visibility with display: none as it only runs after the chessboardSize is calculated, that’s why there is no issue with display:none. Last change is when sidebarMode is notStarted then only chessboard is hidden.

I know that 80% of the things I say won’t be understood but I’m not a good explainer so you have do deal with it 😅. Were really close to the end now I just have to make puzzles page and vision page responsive and just polish the website and then click the ship button

Omg how does changing the color model solve the issue

Before that I fixed the black piece being upside down when dragging. You can see it in my last devlog’s video. I was only happening with black pieces because to make the board work when user got the black pieces I just rotated the board 180 degree. This made all the pieces upside down and to fix that I again rotated the piece’s img 180 degree. Ig when dragging using dnd-kit (npm package) the transform value was being overwritten causing this issue. To fix the issue rather the rotating with board using css I changed the order of files and ranks. I used flex-direction column replacing column-reverse for the rank to start from 1 to 8. Then for reversing the files when color is black then I mapped squares from reversed files array using toReversed array method. I thought by doing this I’ll make the code cleaner but I think it’s more messy now 😭 . Also I did have hard time understanding my own code when trying to solve the issue 😭 . I fixed the pieces, destSquares and captureSquares being generated on the wrong squares.

I realized the piece transition wasn’t working when capturing piece both for user’s piece and opponent’s piece. The transition only happens if hasPlacedPieces is set to true and isDragging is false. So, my first assumption the hasPlacedPieces was being turned to false only when capturing pieces but I was wrong. I was checked if it had something to do with the value of isDragging. I found the isDragging was never turned false so I fixed it but still the main issue wasn’t resolved. I was console logging things and just trying to figure out what was actually causing the issue. The fix was really simple. To implement the drag and drop feature I’ve broken down piece code into it’s own component. There inside the component I have added the key attribute and it was the issue. The key attribute is supposed to be used on the component itself instead of inside the component div. (Eg.) I don’t know why it only broke the capture transition but anyways it’s fixed

Now to the part where I don’t even understand how does this even happen. Hopefully you understood what I was saying in the video btw please unmute the video as I am talking in that video. So what happened was the piece img bg color changes when it’s selected. This was working fine until I added the dragging feature. When the piece is dragged you see the background color comes along with the piece. So I decided that the square should change it’s color rather than the img inside the piece. I was going to create squareRefs for holding all the values of sqaures and then select the square using gsap to change the color but I realized a easier way would be to just target the square id.

It worked so I also decided to use for changing background color of square when user move was either correct or incorrect. On light squares it worked great and it also fixed the animation as the same animation was working a little weirdly when using pieceRefs. I was happy that it was better but then I found the bug from the video. I tried different things and just couldn’t figure out what was the issue but when I decided to change the color from var(–c-red) to yellow it worked as intended. Then I changed the same hsl color into hex and it also worked but I don’t know whyyyy.

If someone knows why this happened please tell me cuz it’s ridiculous. Most of the issue had a simple solution but learning what caused the issue what the difficult part.

Worked on the drag and drop feature

Although it’s not fully complete and polished, it’s kinda working. I stopped working on the feature and started writing this devlog cuz

1. It has been 3hrs
2. I’m forgetting what I did while working on it.

Firstly I wasn’t even going to implement this on the first place as I thought this was outside my coding capability but someone gave me a feedback that I should add this feature so I decided to give it a shot. I found out about the dnd-kit package for implementing drag and drop. I was skeptical of using it at first. I was reading their docs to figure out the package. My main concern was how would I implement the feature with the already existing click to move feature.

They provide a useDraggable hook for making any element draggable. The useDraggable was used to make the piece draggable. I had to convert the piece code into a component for it to work. To drop something into another thing there’s useDropable hook which as the piece I made square, destSquares and captureSquares into components. If I were a good react dev I would’ve already did those things ig the using the package is some what helping my code to be cleaner.

I used the useDroppable hook inside destinationSquares and captureSquares. I was concerned that we couldn’t actually drop the piece as it doesn’t live inside the square rather it lives on top of the board using position absolute. But, I had gotten dnd-kit wrong. I element does need go inside the element if useDroppable is used. There’s DragDropProvider that connects both draggable and droppable hook. Let’s just say DragDropProvider gave me all the function such as dragEnd and values needed to move the piece.

Later I changed the useDroppable to be inside all squares cuz after dragging the piece there was some issues when dropping the piece in it’s original square if the user wanted to cancel the move. I didn’t really have to write new code for moving, capturing and resettingSquare as the code I wrote previously worked fine with the drag and drop functionality.

There were many issues while trying to add this feature. Still there are issues I need to fix such as the highlighting the square bg color instead of the piece bg color when selecting piece and other bugs I’ve found. Also transition when opponent captures pieces doesn’t working also need to fix that. But, I’m really glad I tried to add this feature as I’ve learned alot and the puzzles board now feels more fun because of the feature. Thanks @PAPER_01 for suggesting the feature 💖

Okay, I’ll stop yapping. Have a good time

Gosh I’m so dumb

Last time I thought I had fixed 404 page issue when visiting paths like course directly. I did fix it for local development but not for production which is really dumb, shouldn’t the development environment be the same as deployment when using vercel cli. I tweaked the vercel.json to fix the issue in production now but now in the development the website didn’t work. The fix that I’m now using is leaving the production as it is and in devlopment using the environment created by vercel cli only as backend and running the frontend seperately using pnpm run dev. To connect both backend and frontend I configured the vite.config.js to redirect every /api request to localhost:3000(this is running throught vercel cli)

Most of the time was spent on making the signup page responsive. The login page is also now responsive but it’s just a copy paste of signup page css. I am quite dissapointed in myself because it took me so long to do this and still I don’t like how it looks on certain screens. As I realized that I was spending too much time on making signup page responsive I panicked and just rushed the process. As a result a have a reponsive signup and login page that I’m not very proud of.

I fixed the signup not working. While signing up there it showed user already exist error everytime. The fix was quite simple, I had missed await keyword when checking for user with same email in database. Due to which the userExists variable was always true. Then I did something really dumb.

I tried to fix something that was already working. I was worried that if I delete a user from database and then if that user tries to login then it would throw an error so without even checking if that was true I started making changes to the protectRoute.js file. I was thinking after the token is verified then I’ll just check if the user exists or not. In the process I deleted one important line of code because of which I wasn’t able to login now and I didn’t know why. I tried made the code as before not knowing the line is still missing so the error still persisted. After giving up and doing ctrl + z undo the previous code returned I finally realized the missing line of code. Also the feature was already there when fetching user data so none of this was necessary 🫠 .

We’ve reached 200 hours

It’s a big milestone that I’ve finally reached .

I’ve made the whole course page responsive. This took me longer than I’ve expected. But before that I was getting 404 not found when visiting locations like /course directly but it was working normally when I was navbar to navigate. I’ve seen this issue before as well so I kinda knew that this was because of react SPA (Single Page Application) thing. To fix this I configured the vercel.json file and now it works as expected.

So onto the course page. Firstly I made the accordions responsive on mobile screens using css clamp function. I removed the course info section for mobile devices. I didn’t touch the course card as they were a future problem for me to do. But the basic idea was the image with take up the whole width and the image and the text will be vertically aligned instead of the default horizontal alignment.

Between 1024px and 768px one of the issues was the course info was looking crammed on the smaller side. so I reduced the padding and font-sizes with clamp css function so that it still looks good on the bigger screens. I also made the progress bar slimmer and badges smaller. Another issue were the course cards. One the bigger screens they looked find but on smaller screens the text were taking up more height than the image itself. I changed the value of thumbnail image from fixed value to %. Also I reduced the massive 1.75rem padding on the course card container for smaller screens.

Also for all screens sizes below768px I made the banner slightly bigger vertically as the previous banner was looking very slim on mobile devices.

I scraped the idea of making course cards vertically aligned and stayed with the horizontal alignment. I somehow managed the cards to look decent on smaller screens as well by using clamp(). The things I needed to do were similar but I guess it took me long as I was first checking the min and max values using browser dev tools and then putting that into clamp calculator and then pasting the value into vscode. Basically I had to constantly switch between things.

In the end, I went to sleep but couldn’t fall asleep so I decided to complete the course page reponsiveness and do on last thing which was making the loading spinner responsive. Then, I peacefully went to bed .

This was a rough one

One a good note I’ve completed making the home page responsive (for now). After making the hero section more responsive last time I then proceeded with making the courses and puzzles page more responsive.

I mainly used the clamp css funciton to make the course and puzzles section responsive. The courses section remained the same as I am quite happy wiht how it turn out but I didn’t like how the puzzles section was looking after testing the website out in my phone. It looked to small for a section so below 768px instead of the text and image being horizontally aligned it’s now vertically aligned. The clamp part was similar to the courses section.

Finally after completing those two I started working on the visualization section. I was the hardest section to make responsive due to the absolute positioning of the moves. Firstly I only focused on bigger screens as I had no idea how it would look on smaller devices. The moves were positioned before by mapping an array with the move notation and the css of top and right/left with percent values. I tried to remove that and instead of mapping the elements I thought of manually placing them and giving the ids by which I could have greater control over the css. While trying that I couldn’t make it work as in smaller screen heights it still looked terrible.

At this point I was losing hope. I was wasting time watching a anime series just so I could avoid working on this. I tried thinking out the solution but nothing came in mind. Later when I was messing around with css throught the developer tools on the browser I realized the I could change the height of the image container to change the positioning of the moves as the moves are postioned on the basis of the image container. Now below 1440px the height of image container is 90% and below 1024px it’s 80% and I have a max-height value set for safety. It’s not prefect but it’s much better and I’m relieved 😌 .

The mobile design uses a image contaning the main image and all the moves as there’s no animation on mobile devices. I made the image in fimga and using clamps and % values I think it’s decently responsive.

To make the pages responsive I am using the developer tool in browser to first figure out the min and max values and the putting that value into clamp calculator to generate values. I am constantly switching between vscode and browser for this and if you have a better way to do it please lemme know. Okay the devlog has turned very long so biee…

Worked on hero and puzzles section (Responsiveness)

The puzzles section was the easier that hero and courses section for making it responsive cuz puzzles section doesn’t contain any animations or any special thing. After several trials of adjusting the fonts and image I stopped after it looked quite decent. Before working on the visualization section I decided to polish the hero section first.

My main goal with polishing the hero sectino was mainly using clamp() css function for smooth responsive text. Although the text are responsive using media queries in hero section, the text look kinda odd in some screens. After using clamp the website feels better that before. Also I changed the width of image with % values which does feel better. I also used clamp for some vertical padding as well cuz it was looking bad for devices with smaller vertical heights.

I thought from 425px to 768px was tablet screen size but it seems the tablet screen size starts from 768px. So now upto 768px the website follows the mobile design. Now I’ll polishing courses section and puzzles sections just like the hero section. Wish me luck 😄. Bye

I wanted to add more images but it seems 4 is the limit .

More website responsive stuff

Firstly, I removed the animations from home and courses section below 768px of screen size. I didn’t remove the hero section starting animation cuz it’s nice. I used gsap matchMedia to achieve this. While removing the animations a funny thing happened, the matchMedia wasn’t working and then I was reading this a gsap forum hoping to see where did I go wrong. I later found that I was doing things correctly but instead of looking at localhost I was looking at live website. Obviously the changes didn’t appear 🤦‍♂️

Then, I made the courses section kinda resposive. Firstly I went to figma to design the mobile version of courses section as I was mainly unsure of what to do with the thumbnail cards. I decided to turn them into carousel which imo was a great idea. First, I turned turned the main courses section text smaller and then started working on the carousel.

The making of carousel was rough. Firstly I was reading stuff online on how the sliding thing works. I think I somewhat figured that out but what I couldn’t figure out is the aligning the cards perfectly. The issue was I was going for a style where the first and the last card aren’t centered alight while the rest of them are. The swiping snapped the cards into place and some parts of the left and right cards would also be visible. I couldn’t figure out how to make this and was about to making hamburger menu but coincidentally while scrolling the stardance home page I saw recommended projects section where it’s like a carousel without the snapping thing. It was way easier to achieve than what I was thinking so even though I didn’t make what I wanted the carousel isn’t bad.

The overall the courses section felt responsive so I started working on the hamburger menu. Working on hamburger menu went pretty smoothly except for some things going wrong here and there. I first roughly designed the the menu in figma and then wrote the code.

Starting making the website responsive

Before starting on making the website responsive I saw that when logging in or signing up there is some delay before redirection where people might click the login button several times thinking that it it’s working which is bad ux. In development there was almost no delay because I was using local mongodb. To let the user know that the button has been clicked successfully and to prevent multiple login/signup button clicks the buttons are disabled as soon as user clicks any button in login or signup page while turning the buttons color into gray.

Now on to the reponsive ui part. I first tried making the navbar responsive but it didn’t look right in small screens. I was also trying to make the hero section responsive but without any design to follow. So realizing that I needed a design first I then hopped onto figma to design the navbar and hero section. I changed the ui of the navbar ig to make it easier to make it responsive but I don’t know if the navbar ui got better or worse. I know one thing and that is the navbar has got simpler.

The design on the mobile is pretty simple imo but that’s the best I could do to make it look decent. I used flex property to make all the text align vertically in phones and decided to remove the image in phone screens. I’ve have currently hidden all sections below 1024px except the hero section to focus only on the hero section without other sections interference. I’ve mostly used hardcoded values to make hero section which I will change to clamp css propery for smoother hero section responsiveness. I have just eyeballed the sizes and paddings which is a bad idea but I’m just lazy to create figma design for every layouts.

Now, I’ll make the hamburger menu working. Uhh, I hate making website responsive but it has to be done. If you’ve any suggestion feel free to leave it down in the comments.

The website is live guys

I used vercel to deploy my mern stack project and it was rough . I first tried deploying the the frontend and the backend separately. After reading blogs and trying I ended up deploying the express backend but at that point I had learned that there’s vercel cli with which I don’t have to push commits everytime to find out errors in production. I can just use “vercel dev” command to create a production like environment but for development and testing out. I couldn’t figure out how to run frontend and backend seperately using vercel cli.

I then tried deploying the whole repo. The issue with this was I couldn’t configure the website with folder structure like this

chess-website
----frontend
----backend

Maybe there’s a way to make this work (I couldn’t ), I chose the easier path which I’m kinda familiar with.

In this approach there’s no frontend and backend directory. The backend is renamed to api which allows vercel to recognize that it’s the backend and all the contents of the frontend folder will be moved up to the root directory. Errors came as I changed the folder structure but fixed on after another. The backend wasn’t working which got me really confused. There were many issues in this approach as well but atlast the website is running and backend is working properly .

The two days break I took from coding is over and i think I feel better. Here’s the link to the website:

https://evochess.vercel.app/

Many small improvements 🙂

I’ve added transition to level btns and added icons and different ui to puzzle sidebar button. I am using an array inside objects to display all buttons. So to customize the buttons I manipulated the array.Some button have only text, some have both text and img and some have only img. Also the main button is wider and other buttons are gray in background color. For this I used the className like in tailwind to add the styling meaning the buttons which need gray color will have the className gray. The size of the buttons is differentiated using different values of flex grow. I think the buttons look way better now.

I’ve added reset if user changes from puzzles page to other page. The is to avoid any unnecessary bugs and error. I had already done this in vision page now it was the turn of the puzzles page.

I have been avoiding this for so long but finally I’ve done it. I added the videos for professional course (or should I say advance course). I changed the name to advance cuz professional is just the wrong word to use here. I also moved some videos from beginner to intermediate. Now that the courses are in place I can finally write what you’ll learn in the information section. I’ve added numbers such as 0 - 1000 representing what I mean by beginner. I’ve tried to match videos to the elo level. The data in courses section in the home page is also change from placeholder data. Looking back at the code they are really bad but I’ll leave it as it is not broken 😁.

Now I think the project is coming to it’s final stages I do need to add things but after that ig all I need is to polish the website and make website responsive.

I’ve also fixed progress bar animation happening everytime on reload. This was a small thing but it was bugging me so I decided to fix it. Fixing it was annoying as I had expected to fix this easily. After some trial and error I fixed it using a hasCompleted state which is set to true after finish lesson button is click. Only when the hasCompleted is true the animation occurs.

Some other changes I did were fixing only displaying highest achieved medal in course page and adding background color transitions to buttons.

Enought yapping. I don’t feel like coding and I think I should take some rest for the next two days. Hope the rest reset my feelings and returns me to my prime stardance days 😆.

Wow! This is the 51th devlog

I’ve added the player color indicator in the sidebar. It tells you which color you’re playing. Before coding this I just complicating things in my head by thinking of creating new unnecessary states. I used pen and paper to think and realized why not use the color state already available in chessboard. To access the state I moved it up to the puzzles context file where both sidebar and chessboard could get and change the color. I also moved the hint down as it look clutter both color and hint together in the sidebar.

Two quick small fixes. I fixed retry and back button not working and fixed replay button not playing the same level only on last level.

I’ve added pawn promotions functionality to the opponent’s pawns. In puzzle 17 and 26 there are promotions that happen but without the promotion part it just looks weird to look at. Especially in level 26 where the pawn promotes to a knight and without having that knowledge the user will just get confused. I haven’t added promotion functionality for the user pawns because there is no puzzle that requires it. I will add it if I have the time to but rn i am going to just ignore it. One of the bugs I faced while doing this was the knight promotion worked fine but the queen promotion at level 17 wasn’t. The pawn was just disappearing because the pawn was capturing itself cuz the promotion only work for black pieces which is now fixed.

Next I fixed the random color option color menu not working. Idk when and how it broke I thought it was working fine but it seems not. It seems it was not working because the element was being unmounted before running the selectRandomColor function. So, I moved it to vision context and with a useEffect hook it runs every time hasStarted is true.

A small change but which I feel great that it’s solved. When clicking on accordion or pieces twice sometimes it selects the icon and other things which was just annoying. The fix was just two lines of css which I learned from a random dude on the internet. Really thank that random dude.

I’ve now added functionality for adding multiple bestScore for according to the time and color. Before the highest score in vision would be the score scored across any time or color. So if you were to score 5 point in 45 seconds and score 5 points in 30 seconds they were treated as the same thing which imo opinion isn’t fair. To achieve this I used object inside a object unlike the single number representing the bestScore like before. The object looks like this.

{
    white: {
        15: 0,
        30: 0,
        45: 0,
    },
    black: {
        15: 0,
        30: 0,
        45: 0,
    }
}

I did have a very hard time figuring out how to update the state like this as I had to change the specific time score within the correct color. One thing I did learn from this is we can use square brackets for using a variable’s value as key while manipulating the useState object.
I also encountered some errors while trying to implement this functionality. Now everything is working as expected.

I’m so sloppy now

I’ve added sounds for piece movement, capturing piece and completed puzzle. I spent more time than I should’ve finding the sounds. I am still not sure about the sounds that I’ve added expect completed puzzle sound. There was issue with playing sounds during opponent move cuz unlike moving player’s piece where there are seperate function for moving and capturing pieces, the moving and capturing logic is inside the same function. After thinking a while I did solve the issue. It seems mac default recording doesn’t capture sounds so you just have to trust me here 😅.

I’ve made hint button disabled when pieces are moving (Both player and opponent piece). I did this after figuring out if user click the hint button quickly after the last puzzle move then we get an error. Although this thing happening is very unlikely but it’s better to always fix bugs. Also I don’t know what happens if user clicks on hint inbetween moves so I think preventing it is better.

A small change, I’ve added better hover transition to logout button. I didn’t add a red background during making it cuz I had issue with chaning the svg color. I’ve learned that if I make the svg inline in the jsx and set fill to currentColor then I can change the svg color through css and add transitions.

Also, I’ve added popup animations to time menu and color menu. I was even struggling with this even though I’ve added those kind of animations before. I was using the new Activity element in react to toggle the menus but to for adding the animations I’ve removed the Activity element cuz the menu would disappear before animating.

I took some break from coding cuz I got sick. I think I’m really sloppy now. Imo these changes shouldn’t have taken me 2hrs. Hope I will be able to shake off this sloppiness.

A little rest from programming

I’ve added hint button in the puzzles sidebar. I had been trying to avoid working on this but I couldn’t avoid it forever. Also the puzzles sidebar looked really empty without the hint button. In chess.com the hint button highlights the correct. I did things a little differently, the hint is communicated via text to user. The text animates during first appearance and I’ve made it so that user gets only one hint. After the hint the button goes gray indicating it’s not clickable anymore.

I made puzzles sidebar code better to display buttons and also added replay button with functionality on successful puzzle complete. I mainly made the code better cuz I need to add the replay button. The replay button is same as retry button for replaying the puzzle after completion.

I made next button do nothing if user reaches the last level. Before when completing the last puzzle level we would reach the next level automatically which is prevented now.

I’ve been sick for 2-3 days now and am just writing this devlog. Hopefully from tomorrow I will be working on the project more seriously.

Interesting updates

I added back button in puzzles sidebar with functionality. Before there was not way to go to the default sidebar (the notStarted state). Now after messing up or completing a puzzle there’s a back button which sets the board to default postion and set sidebarMode to “notStarted”. I wanted both buttons to be taking up equal space but later thought the smaller back button is better.

Also now, puzzleLevel updates instantly updates after solving a puzzle instead of updating only after clicking next puzzle button.

User can now select and play any completed puzzle by clicking level btns in sidebar. Previously user can only start the puzzle Level user has reached which meant no puzzle 1 and 2 resolving puzzle after user has reached level 3. I split the puzzleLevel state into selectedLevel and highestReachedLevel. The puzzle is set to the selectedLevel and the buttons aren’t clickable above the highestReachedLevel.

The ui of level buttons is changed. I made the buttons smaller and made the selected level more distinct by adding a inner glow to the button.

We’ve upto 30 levels now . I downloaded the lichess puzzles database for this project but whenever I opened the file my laptop will just heat as there were more than 69 millions data 💀 . I did try to use the lichess data but I didn’t actually like the progression of difficulty so I used chatgpt to make puzzles. I’ve played upto 21 levels and I think it’s good so far.

That’s all for now, okay bie….