Primary goals finished

I ended part 2 with a few next steps. Today I finished the first, which was the most important to me. The rest was purely UI; also critical to the project’s overall goals, but in my mind, easier and more predictable. The spacing issue was the last known problem with the tree animations itself and I’m glad that’s out of the way.

Taking a break

Since the last post, I did some basic googling for my own project to see where it was at in the search rankings. For some reason, I was surprised to see other projects that were much further along than my own and doing the same thing. This was surprising to me because I swear I did this research already, years ago when I first got this idea. I either didn’t use the right search terms, or those projects have sprung up since my initial idea. When I actually started development on this project, I didn’t do the research again. Lesson learned. A big motivator for the project, for me, was that there wasn’t already a tool for this. Now that I know there are, I don’t feel it’s worth continuing at this point.

Worth a shoutout: I think VisuAlgo exactly captured what I was after. Its execution of drawing the AVL Tree is flawless. What a great project. It’s clearly something the author put a lot of time into making sure it worked smoothly. I know it would take a lot of work to get my own project to this state, at which point it would just be a clone in Unity. Not something I feel is worth doing, at least for the project’s current goals.

I’m a bit bummed I didn’t re-research this project before starting development, but I’m also kind of relieved to shelve this project because it was incredibly tedious. I can now focus on something else. I do have another project idea I want to try, so stay tuned!