Introducing "Forza Update", a minisite automatically tracking the next Forza Horizon 5 season & series

As you might have realised from my many previous Forza Horizon 5 posts, I play it a lot! Each week we get a new content drop, and I often got confused about update times due to timezones. To solve this, I created a new minisite.

The site is available at forza.jakelee.co.uk.

It is very intentionally functionality-first, so don’t expect any fancy design ideas here! Here’s how it looks:

How it works

All the code used for the site is public (forza.js specifically), and it is honestly mostly from StackOverflow.

Every function that is adapted from a StackOverflow answer is credited, but here is a complete list:

• Creating a date for a specific day each week.
• Displaying a countdown to a date.
• Calculating weeks between 2 dates.
• Adding days to a date

The functions are self-explanatory, and even a not-very-good JavaScript programmer like myself can eventually figure out how they work! For example, this function (from StackOverflow) works out when the next season starts (next Thursday at 14:30 GMT):

function getNextSeasonStart(d = new Date()) {
    let thursday = new Date(Date.UTC(d.getFullYear(), d.getMonth(), d.getDate() + (4 - d.getDay()), 14, 30, 0, 0));
    thursday <= d ? thursday.setDate(thursday.getDate() + 7) : null;
    return thursday;
}

Plans

I’d like to expand on the site eventually to have an actual design besides GitHub Pages’ default. For now though, it’s “good enough”.

Additionally, currently I have to manually update the new series’ title once per month. Ideally this would be automated, but I am not particularly interested in parsing the Forza team’s news posts!

It would be interesting to incorporate new car unlocks & purchasable DLC into the site, but since they’re so unpredictable I’m unsure how to do it efficiently. For now, the useful links to other resources will have to be enough.

Conclusion

Overall I’m happy enough with the site, and I’ll likely use it each week to check when I’ll receive an update due to shifting timezones. I was surprised how easy timezones were to work with in Javascript (once I discovered Date.UTC), and this was a good chance to play with basic math and date functionality.

One last time, the site is at forza.jakelee.co.uk.