A full featured BlackJack game that started as a chapter exercise on learncpp.com. I was amazed at how simple it was to capture the most basic rules of BlackJack, so I decided to implement a graphical version in Unity. My C++ code transferred over to Unity and C# very easily and I implemented the rules that had not been part of the exercise on learncpp.com, getting blackjack with two cards, and aces worth either 1 or 11.

Adding doubling down was very straight-forward, but adding splitting was quite tricky, as I knew it would be. Instead of dealing with a single hand, I had to account for multiple hands. Even though I had accounted for this and allowed for my implementation to be changed to an array-based implementation, it required some refactoring of my code to get an elegant design. And of course I had to make sure that doubling-down after splitting worked correctly

Perhaps the trickiest part was figuring out how and where to add appropriate delays for actions like displaying dealt cards on the screen. Being able to follow the action as it unfolds instead of immediately racing to the final result made the game feel much more natural and increased the suspense of whether you were going to win or not. I had used InvokeRepeating() before but not StartCoroutinue(), which is what this really called for, in able to be able to use yield to introduce delays at specific points in the game. Getting the proper mix of event-driven code and asynchronous delays was tricky, but it all came together eventually.