What is the Game?

freeCodeCamp's LearnToCodeRPG has been described as an interactive visual novel game. It teaches you to code via simple multiple choice quiz questions and simulates you starting your dev journey and landing your first role in tech.

You can find it here to download and play on your computer - not currently supported on mobiles.

Why I Started

As I reflected on 2021, I couldn't ignore the fact that I slowed myself down when it came to achieving a lot of my tasks because I was using so many resources to achieve the same thing. Think of all those Udemy courses you my have, GitHub repos you have saved to look through or technical articles you have open to have a read through and test some code with.

So, when Quincy Larson announced his 2022 Become-a-Dev New Year's Resolution Challenge, I jumped at the chance to try a more structured coding challenge! It works well for me as I want to learn more about relational databases and it involves writing more here on Hashnode, which I definitely want to do more of in 2022. Check out the challenge here:

Review

Below I have bullet pointed a few quick points about my experience that include the positive and negative points, as well as parts I am unsure whether they are positive or negative and an extra bonus feature I am glad came out from this project. Check them out here:

Positives:

• Beautiful
• Not too long
• Quizzes give immediate feedback
• Plenty of quiz questions
• Incorporates the need for breaks
• Highlights the benefits of learning with other people
• Shows how other opportunities can come up along the way and its okay if they end up suiting you more than being a full-time dev

Negatives:

• Repetitive start and end to the days
• Some questions repeat right after each other, which isn't always helpful

Unsure:

• There is a major difference in amount of 'sanity' points you can get from taking a break, which uses up a turn for the day (can go from 5 to 19 points) - good to show that sometimes a short break doesn't cut it and you need to relax more, but also really slows down the game which will start to move forward by a week instead of a day. It meant I focused more on the game aspect than the learning aspect.

Extra:

• You can find all 619 quiz questions from the game right here! I will definitely be looking into creating an Anki deck based off of them.

Follow me here or on Twitter to follow along with my coding journey!