Snappy Squirrel Rides Again with Amazon Q and Phaser: A Refactoring Success

It took a while, but I finally brought this old game back to life!

For a little context, back in 2014 (wow, it was ten years ago!) my father and I cooked up a concept to teach about personal finance in a way kids would understand. He came up with the idea of a story series about a little squirrel who has to work to save and store nuts under adverse circumstances. Snappy really does get put through the wringer!

You can read 5 of the books we produced with art produced by my daughter on my web site . These e-books, still available on the web, however, were originally books for iPad written and configured using Corona SDK, a terrific 2D game development platform that was paired with the first tech community I integrated with as a junior developer. The original e-books had the stories that you can still read, with the little interactive ladybug element, but also a game attached to each book so that kids could have a little fun on top of the learning. Cool, no?

Here's what it looks like on the web:

When I removed books out of the Apple and Google app stores, I converted them to a web-friendly format using VuePress (which also needs to be refactored and updated) and archived the original files, including each e-book's little paired game.

Could these games be brought back to life? With a little help from Amazon Q Developer, they could! This is the endless scroller game, 'Run Snappy Run!' - dodge the stones, and grab the flying acorns!

It was very helpful to point .lua files (Corona SDK was written in Lua) to Amazon Q Developer in VS Code and get tips on how to convert the files. I learned that CoronaSDK is now called Solar2D  but still only works on mobile and a desktop app. For the web, Amazon Q suggested using Phaser.io , a JavaScript game engine with a friendly, easy-to-learn API.

Wanting to stick with the simple 2D scroller format, I figured it was worth a try. And with a code helper, the refactoring turned into a learning experience. After an initial conversion from the .lua game to JavaScript, I was able to get pertinent help from the editor to explain what various functions were doing:

And after a considerable amount of time because I'm rusty with game dev... I present to you: Run, Snappy, Run! You can play it online here  and find the code on GitHub .

Simple but fun. Use your spacebar to jump over stones and collect the nuts.

If you love game development, take a look at the current Hackathon on DevPost .