Nate Van Bonn

- previously known as Nate Wichman

I loooove bowling. Even though I am a Web Developer by trade I decided to try my hand at Game Dev with Unity. Lucky I write a lot of C# professionally so the learning curve wasn't too bad.

Bowling has some interesting physics. The lanes are oiled, usually with more oil in the center, and the edges of the lane are almost dry. I spent a lot of time matching that physics by having the edges have more friction. You may notice when you put spin on the ball it hooks much faster when it hits the edge.

I wanted to make it as difficult as real bowling. Any other game I played was too easy to get a strike. Fortunately, I could test on myself because I bowl so much. I fine tuned the game so that I could get just as many strikes when I bowl for real.

The game was made in Unity (a popular game engine). Unity uses C#. I also used Blender for some of the 3d models as well as using free 3d models and materials from the Unity Asset Store. Eventually I would like to get better at 3d modelling as a hobby, though my main focus will always be coding.

This app allowed you to create your own 'Choose your own adventure story'. After writing your story, you could publish it for anyone to read. You could rate other peoples stories as well as follow them and other Social Media features. You could search and filter by Popular, Recent, and Categories of stories.

The tree view was very difficult for me to build. I actually built the whole app in React Native originally, but the SVG plugin for React native was too slow at the time. So I shifted the whole application to Capacitor and pure React so that I could use all of the native web SVG features and it was lighting fast.

One of the benefits of not having a deadline for my own apps is I can complexly re-do features if I don't like the way I implemented them. I originally wrote the app using SQL, but I noticed the complex tree view was very complex in SQL. I realized that all that complexity was just breaking the tree view apart and storing it in SQL tables, then my queries just re-assembled them. Basically I was just saving a file without any relational logic, so why am I using SQL? So I ripped out my whole backend and wrote it with Google Firestore NoSQL. The tree view went from ridiculously complex to super easy.

I wanted to improve my SQL so I decided to write all my SQL in raw SQL. I didn't use any search providers like Algolia, but I still wanted Fuzzy search (if a user mispells a word or writes a similar word it should still work).