progress report:
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:
