Transition

It's time! For the weekly...

📺🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸📺

What's new this week?

Transition

I've been working hard on making the next video, 📺 Screens in Screens in Screens. And this week, I've been making all the transitions between the different parts of the video. In other words, the little bits in between different 'chapters'.

For example, in the previous video, ✨ New Cellular Automata, the transitions were the 'social media post' sections. In the next video, the transitions involve the tode/berd/bot characters in various scenes. It'll be similar to my 🚨 Crime video in some ways.

When I make a video, I find that I spend almost all of my time on the transitions. This sometimes feels strange, because the transitions don't take up much time in the final product. But I definitely think that it helps to focus on them the most. I imagine it like: Colouring in a picture. It's best to spend a little bit of time colouring in the edges first. Then, it's a quick-and-easy job to fill in the rest.

Back to Nothing

As the vote decided, the video after the next one will be 🔮 Spellular Automata. This means that we'll return to CellPond (the engine from the 🤖 Nothing video). Except this time, we'll make some much more advanced/complicated things.

To start to get ready for this, I've been planning out some things we could make. And I've been revisiting some of the old features and design decisions that I made for the engine.

For example, there are a bunch of visual improvements that I've wanted to make for a while now. I couldn't implement them when I was making the original video, because I didn't want the engine's appearance to change partway through. But now, we can do a mini-refresh!

The main thing I want to do is replace the 'flashing' effect of squares in the user-interface. It's used to indicate that a square represents more than one possible colour. But it's annoying to have it flashing all the time... and it's also unclear - because you have to wait for it to cycle around to see all the colours that it represents.

Octagon vs Diamond

Another thing I want to improve is the ability to add/subtract numbers. One of the main feedback points I heard from the 🤖 Nothing video was this: "I don't understand the bit about diamonds."

I've been thinking about it a lot... and I think I'll add a new shape to the toolbar at the top. That shape is... the octagon! The octagon will combine some of the functionality of diamonds and rectangles - hopefully simplifying things in the process.

So... diamonds represent a channel of a colour (either red, green, or blue). And rectangles represent a number. So if you combine a diamond and a rectangle, you can edit a channel. For example... 'RED + 2'. You can then place this back into a channel to edit a colour. You could place it into the red channel, which we could represent as 'RED = RED + 2'.

'RED' appears twice in this example, so you have to choose it twice. And I think this confused some people. First you have to choose a RED diamond. Then you have to choose the RED channel. With an octagon, you don't have to worry about this.

You can just place an octagon into a channel, and choose to increase/decrease it by an amount (without needing to worry about diamonds at all). We could think of this more like 'RED += 2' (increase RED by 2).

Wow, that's a lot of info for one TODEPOND TIMES! Does it make any sense? Maybe not! Will I make it either way? Definitely!

Thank you very very very much for continuing to support me. I really appreciate being able to dedicate time to making my projects and videos, and you are a huge part of that. Have a great week! And see you soon! 📺🐸📺

Days since tode got locked in a cage: 132