Spelling Spells

What time of the week is it? It's time for the...

🔮🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸🔮

What's new this week?

Spells

The next video is going to be themed around crafting+casting spells! Each spell is going to be a different cellular automata simulation. Such as... Fire, Lightning, etc... I call this... 🔮 Spellular Automata!

To prepare for the video... I've been tweaking+improving the CellPond engine.

Originally, I was going to add a little controls menu to CellPond. It would let you change things like... brush size, simulation speed, and all that jazz.

BUT! I've been thinking about it, and - what I like about CellPond is - it's very bare. There are so few things to interact with, that it becomes a bit cryptic. There are no words, options, or clear ways of using it. There are just SHAPES (to interact with). I think that adding a boring-old controls menu would take away some of the intrigue & over-simplicity of it.

So I've been trying to figure out how to pack more functionality into what's already available.

One important new feature that I need is: I need a way of filling the entire world with just ONE cell. By default, the world is 64-by-64 cells big. But for some more wacky spells, like fractals, it works better to just start over from a 1-by-1 world.

Currently, you can press the zero key on your keyboard, and then click on the world. But I'd like to be able to do it with just the mouse! So I've been experimenting with ways of achieving this by doing a gesture, such as holding the mouse button down on the 'void' surrounding the world. I'll give it a go!

Spelling

In the video, certain spells will be represented by some TodeTode - the fake ancient language of todes. Thanks to continuing help from patrons SimplyLinn and Magnogen, the language has developed quite a lot since the original video!

There's now a clear-ish way of spelling WORDS!

To write a word, you need to combine together some of the different symbols of TodeTode. And there are two ways of doing this:

🐸 Writing a symbol above another symbol
🐸 Writing a symbol inside another symbol

For example, look at the word for 'Sand' (in the image above). At the bottom, it's the Water symbol (a horizontal line). And above that... it's the Tree symbol (a vertical line). We read words from bottom-to-top, so the word is "Water Tree". Yep! 'Sand' in TodeTode is "Water Tree". A literal translation of "Water Tree" would be 'home of plant', AKA sand/soil/ground.

Symbols can also be placed inside other symbols. Take a look at the word for 'Speak'. The outer-shape is the Wind symbol (a backwards 'C'). And inside that... is the Bot symbol (a square). We read the word from outside-to-inside, so the word is "Wind ( Bot )". Yep! The word for 'Speak' is "Wind ( Bot )". Notice how we can use brackets to show that Bot is inside Wind. A literal translation of this would be 'do speech/communication'.

By combining different symbols together, and then combining those words, we can start to make some more complex phrases. It's a gradual-but-fun process! And I enjoy it for the very-same reasons that I enjoy making programming languages. But that's enough of that! We're out of time!

Thank you for all your support! I've been really overwhelmed (in a good way) by how many patrons there are now! I can't thank you enough for helping me to make these videos+projects. I hope you have a great week! 🔮🐸