Been facing some personal demons these past few weeks: gradually reintroducing myself to javascript for the first time in years… messing about with p5js in particular and things have been going surprisingly well? I’ve cobbled together this sorta crude web app for making drawings that wiggle slightly (squigglevision style), letting you add short captions and spitting out a gif of the result.
Progress got halted a bit by gaps in knowledge and finicky technical problems, leading to the return of some old bad habits: blindly googling for quick fixes until my head hurts…
I do feel like I’m learning a bit from past mistakes though, having a better sense of when to take a step back and not get too obsessive about implementing something specific, or just stepping away altogether when necessary. I think the whole experience has felt constructive thus far, even if there are the odd pangs of past trauma from my college days when I was originally studying all this stuff and putting myself under a lot more pressure to “succeed”. Experimenting with dumb ideas just to amuse myself feels a hell of a lot healthier and made me realise that there are actually parts of this process that I’ve missed!
My code is a goddamned mess though and my geriatric phone seems to be overheating due to whatever changes I added recently… Hoping my battery doesn’t explode and take me with it before I figure out how to better optimise things. Too distracted doodling lil guys in hats…
Anyway, I figured I’d make a thread to chart my progress rather than cluttering the group devlog with something that, as of yet, isn’t exactly a game… I dunno, I guess for right now I’m pretty content just working on my dinky doodle tool. Will probably share a link here once I’m reasonably sure that it won’t blow up anyone’s phone…
Had some ideas for how I might be able to turn this into a beginner-friendly game-making tool for simple storybook-style narrative games and then a few minutes later learned of flickgame’s existence lol… I really have been living under a rock, huh?
I even ended up making a lil flickgame of my own but realised I have no convenient way of sharing it here cuz the forum doesn’t seem to allow the upload of html files and the flickgame website’s sharing option requires a github account (which I’m pretty sure I already have but can’t be bothered to log into)
I guess I probably will still pursue my idea for my own tool regardless. I think there’s enough different about the ideas I have for it to at least see how it goes anyway… Also did some reading on p5js optimisation. Might have found some leads on how to better structure my code and avoid fatally burning anyone. Exciting times!!
I am still working on this! got a little sad and mopey after convincing myself that an offline version wouldn’t be possible without a major rewrite. That really took the wind out of my sails for a good two weeks there… and then I got sick with a cold, ended up bored and bedridden. somewhere in my fugue state I started poking around at it again and ended up adding the ability to take photos, which led to a lot of weird shots of me in bed with only my doodles for company (grim) but it also eventually led to re-evaluating my earlier assumptions about what was required for an offline version. Turns out it was a lot more straightforward than I thought (hooray!) although all my added camera stuff would need to be implemented in a slightly different way due to browser restrictions (booo!!)
Lately I’ve been focused on adding a bit more granular control to the fill and eraser functions which has led to much more detailed drawings which you can peek at below along with the slightly worrying shots of me in bed, earlier drawings made prior to getting sick, as well as the return of text and GIFs! Still lots to do of course with some outstanding basic functionality stuff, fiddly little ui things and making sure it scales/works nicely across different browsers/resolutions/platforms/etc… coding is still kind of a pain in the ass for the most part but I’m getting a lot of mileage out of the excitement that comes from each tiny new thing I get working and making sure to take lots of breaks (very important!)
May be a while yet before I reach the (initial?) finish line but I’m enjoying all the downtime in between where I get to dream up all sorts of things that probably end up being way too complicated to actually implement. See you in ten years time when I lose everything to working on the elaborate logic trees that power The Next Great Innovation In Artificial Intelligence, my answer to clippy the paperclip:
also have plenty of thoughts about the whole development process that I might collect up at some point in a single document/essay/whatever. Lots to reflect on about what I’ve learned/unlearned/not learned along the way… all the hurdles, discoveries, boredoms… the works. Turns out “development” is neither as terrible or as amazing as I could have imagined. Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes it’s annoying. Often it’s both. Anyway, I have a neocities page now for hosting this thing so maybe that’s where I’ll end up posting those thoughts. who knows
I’ll leave you for the moment with one of the things that inspired me to start making my own computerised drawing gizmo in the first place, some screenshots from the original 1984 japanese home computer version of princess tomato in the salad kingdom that I stumbled across while learning all about hudson’s early days of making games all about mice and little guys with possible IRA affiliation. y’know, the good ol’ days… when you could still buy tobacco from a raisin or pray to a crucified tomato… simpler times:
