What's the Point?

Hello! It's time for another weekly edition of the...

🐭🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸🐭

What's new this week?

Pointing

This week, I've been doing more preparation work for the next video, 🔮 Spellular Automata. And part of that has been... I've made some custom cursors that I can use on my computer.

In my videos, I often show my cursor - as I often demonstrate how to do/make stuff. But the default Windows cursor seems a bit boring and out-of-place to me. So I've been exploring how to make a 'tode' cursor instead. It's tode sitting on their lilypad, holding a paintbrush in their mouth. I'm going to change the paintbrush to an arrow at some point, but this works for now!

And this will help with the gimmick of the video too - tode and berd are going to take turns showing you how to make things in CellPond. The cursor should help to show who's currently 'in charge'.

Custom cursors feel quite nostalgic to me. I remember downloading fancy cursors from dodgy websites when I was younger, and sharing them with friends. And of course... you always enabled the longest cursor trail possible (for style points).

Painting

Since last week, there's been more progress on PaintPond. SimplyLinn has contributed a bunch of changes+improvements, like... making the brush strokes even smoother, and adding in a screenshot mode. Thanks Linn!

Like in ✨ NEW Cellular Automata, berd (and tode) are going to use PaintPond to write the names of whatever they're making. Berd is going to write in English, just like before. Unfortunately, tode can't speak English. Tode is going to write in the mysterious+ancient language of TodeTode.

That's right! The imaginary language from my least popular video is making another appearance, just like it did in the 🤖 Nothing video.

And with a lot of help from SimplyLinn and Magnogen, the language is becoming a lot more advanced. You can now construct simple sentences with it, and the vocabulary is growing very fast.

One weird aspect of the language is that - sentences can be written in either left-to-right, or right-to-left. They can even change direction partway through, or they can be read in either direction (containing multiple hidden sentences).

Eventually, I'm hoping to make a spatial visual editor+translator for the language (and maybe make a video about it)! But that's probably a long way off!

Planting

Now that I've finished making the Missing Tode Trilogy, I've taken a moment to update some of my older tools. For example, I use a tool called Frogasaurus to bundle together any libraries of code that I make. And I just re-built it! If you don't write code exactly like me, it probably won't work at the moment. But that's ok because it's only me that uses it :)

I'm also planning on simplifying+modernising my go-to toolbox Habitat. Some things in there haven't been touched for quite a lot of years now, and the web changes fast! Magnogen recently improved one of the animation tools in it too. Thanks Magnogen!

One more thing! ... I dug out an old iPhone! And I'm going to try to make sure that all my stuff (eg: SandPond, CellPond, PaintPond) works on it! (they currently don't)

Oh but wait... I do have a video to make too. I'm really excited about it! :)

Welcome to all my new patrons! And welcome back to all my long-term supporters. Thank you so much for backing the videos I'm making. I really hope I can encourage people to be creative in whatever they do. And I hope you're pleased to be a part of that! See you next week! 🐭🐸