JPS Grooves

August 4, 2025 – v0.7.x – The Final Camping Trial Begins

🎯 Mini-Game 3: Ant Attack Has Emerged

As I finished polishing off the Kids Camping Parking Game (🚗 honk logic ✅, park button flow ✅, point system ✅), I didn’t take a break.

Nah. I spiraled straight into concept mode again.

I started dreaming up ideas for the final Kids Camping game.

• Trail Mix Toss? 🍫🥜
• Mosquito Smasher? 🦟💥 (those bastards are out for blood)

But then, I snapped into my real energy.

“I’m the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude…”

What I wanted… what I really wanted…
was a game within a game. A moving game. An ambitious ant-based war zone.

🍇🛑 Welcome to ANT ATTACK!!

You command the black ants 🐜
The red ants? The enemy. 😈
The mission: Keep your food safe. 🍕🍔🍊

🎮 Game Rules (by Patch):

• A food item (orange, grapes, burger, pizza, snowcone) sits in the center.
• Both you and the red ants deploy troops to tug the food back to your base.
• Food has a weight (2–7), and each ant adds +1 force.
• Red ants deploy automatically in waves. Always aggressive.
• Black ants (you!) deploy when you press the Ant button. Timing = everything.
• If your force > red’s, food slides toward you. If they overpower you, it slides away.
• Tug-of-war continues until someone pulls it home.
• If you win, your ant count regenerates. If you lose, you lose deployed ants.
• The game loops forever… because at this festival, food is never safe.

🌀 But First… the Grid

None of this was playable until I could merge the grid zones.

I took a big swing at rewriting .kc-grid to stack the scroller zone and tent zone into one tall vertical cell:

.kc-grid {
  grid-template-areas:
    "title title title title title"
    "scroller scroller tent tent tent"
    "scroller scroller tent tent tent"
    ...

And it was like… bro… nothing changed.
No errors. No warnings. Just vibes. Dead vibes.

I tried fixes. ChatGPT was giving me 20 solutions.
Still nothing budged.

💭 That’s when experience kicked in…
I knew this feeling. This was ghost CSS overriding my dreams.

🧠 Remembers “cosmic modal” wars…

So I scrolled. Searched. And guess what?

I had two .kc-grid blocks.
One was ancient, maybe from early tent grid builds.
I deleted the old one, and in an instant…

💥 the grid merged
💥 the scroller and tent zones unified like butter

📏 I kept going.

I knew the .kc-popper-cell at the bottom was eating screen real estate.
I gave it the business. Min-heights. Max-heights. Padding lockouts.

🌈 And finally—everything is scaling.

Each zone is sharp. Aligned. Touch-happy. Minimal overflow.
There’s still a sliver of unwanted padding on the left edge, but honestly?

That’s v0.9.0’s problem. Not mine tonight.

🔥 Tonight’s Status:

• Parking Game: Complete and Beautiful
• Tent Game: Responsive and Playable
• Ant Attack: Layout done, logic starting
• Grid: Maximized and unified
• Mood: Optimistic ☀️

💭 “Maybe I have Kids Camping Mode done by end of the week…”

Let’s just say — we’re close. 🏕️
But until then…
watch out for bugs. 🐛💥

– JPS
aka Patch Patrol
aka The Dude in the Grid Disguise