Web Developer
Granite Bay, California, Us
As a startup, CoNarrative requires flexible employees. One day I might be learning Scala to help with the natural language processor, the next day I might be delving into SVG land to improve on the animation engine. My primary duty is to implement designs in the UI that were drawn up by our designer. But it's more than just implementing a user "interface," we work together to create a seamless user "experience." We wanted a game-like experience that was responsive and fast, taking cues from the latest game designs, and so we studied various game interfaces and implemented a lot of common design themes. The UI/UX was more than simply some CSS tweaks to make things look pretty. Since the crux of the app was essentially a dynamically generated SVG element, I couldn't just hard-code a few event listeners and CSS into the element. I worked with our senior developer Alex to design what could almost be an entire framework, with SVG being the view, and the model being all of the calculations of the SVG components (bounding box, dimensions, scaling, transforms, relationships, etc). Greensock assisted with the interaction between "model" and "view" but there were still a lot of things I needed to tweak to ensure that the animation engine worked as it was supposed to. Were we able to dynamically put character pins at a certain place? Could we create captions for the story that is currently being generated? Could we move characters along the map, ensuring that they stuck to the road and also found the shortest path between any two locations? At the end of our two-week sprint, Alex and I implemented all of those features and more.