Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I whipped up that Furina banner countdown thingy. It was kinda a spur-of-the-moment project, but I think it turned out pretty neat.
First off, I had this itch to try and make a countdown timer for the Genshin Impact banners, specifically for Furina since everyone was hyped. I kicked things off by googling “javascript countdown timer” – yeah, super original, I know. But hey, gotta start somewhere, right?
I snagged some basic code snippets from a couple of different sites. Nothing fancy, just the bare bones of how to calculate the time difference between now and a future date. The hardest part was figuring out what time the Furina banner actually dropped. I ended up digging around on some Genshin forums and finally found the official announcement with the exact date and time in UTC.
Next, I needed to make it look decent. I’m no designer, trust me. But I messed around with some CSS to make the numbers bigger and bolder. I also grabbed a background image of Furina from the game’s official site. A little bit of positioning and color tweaking, and boom – it was starting to look like something!
Now, the real fun began. I wanted to add some extra flair. So, I thought about adding a little animation that plays when the countdown hits zero. I found some free particle effect libraries online and integrated one. It was a bit of a headache to get the particles to spawn in the right place, but after some trial and error, I managed to get it working. When the timer hits zero, a burst of sparkly particles explodes across the screen. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself.
After that, I spent a good chunk of time just tweaking things. I changed the font, adjusted the colors, and messed with the animation speed until I was happy with it. I also made it responsive, so it looks good on both desktop and mobile.
Here’s a quick rundown of the stuff I used:
- HTML (obviously)
- CSS (for styling)
- JavaScript (for the countdown logic and animation)
- A free particle effect library (cause I’m lazy and didn’t want to write it from scratch)
- Google (my best friend throughout this whole process)
Challenges I ran into:
- Figuring out the exact banner release time. Seriously, why is it so hard to find this info?
- Getting the particle effects to look right. Positioning that stuff is a pain.
- Making it responsive. CSS media queries are my nemesis.
What I learned:
- Even simple projects can be surprisingly time-consuming.
- There are tons of free resources online to help you build stuff.
- I still suck at CSS.
All in all, it was a fun little project. It’s not perfect, but it does the job. And hey, maybe someone else will find it useful too.
