Sometimes in life, we need to take a Risk

I'm a Florida boy, through and through. After graduating in late 2012, I settled into a comfortable, well-paying first job in Tampa. After one year, I decided to leave. A few months later, I'm in Boston living on savings (and occasionally a friend's couch). Why? Because I felt I could do more. I felt I needed to do more.

I don't romanticize struggle or hardship, like many young graduates do. Steve Jobs famously lived on the edge of poverty and homelessness before making it big with Apple, and his story serves as an inspiration to many for following their passion in start up ventures. That's not the life for me. But I do romanticize learning.

This blog is dedicated partially as a digital portfolio of my projects, and also for my current thoughts. We begin with the classic board game Risk, which I recreated in Excel VBA - first as a school assignment, but then as an expansive personal project. You could say this was truly my first software project.

Initial board setup

The game is based on shape clicks which connect to macros. Based on previous actions, the program correctly tracks which phase of the game we are on, and what each click triggers

Active gameplay

The attack/defend algorithm works based on the classic dice roll rules in the original Risk, and is quite simple. To make things easier on record keeping, we easily leverage Excel's spreadsheet structure as a primitive database to store records

Hidden worksheet which tabulates player/territory data

I'm constantly updating this project, and currently working on a simplified AI so single-player mode would be possible. If anyone wishes to challenge their friends, or take a look at some of my code, the game is available. Click here to download!