Words are Cheep

It's that time of the week again! It's time for the weekly...

🐤🐦 TODEPOND TIMES 🐤🐦

What's new this week?

Sandspiel Studio

First of all... Outside of my tode-y projects, I've been working with Max Bittker on making a new cool thing for Sandspiel.

Sandspiel is a sandbox+simulation game that lets you play+draw with different elements like... sand, water, magic dust. Our new experiment/mission is to let the player code and re-code how these elements work. And we want this to be possible for ANYONE... young/old... beginner/advanced.

So we've been making a prototype - called Sandspiel Studio. It lets you code elements by dragging+dropping visual blocks. And it looks similar to Scratch.

We've been working on it for a while now, and it's gone through lots of changes! It's getting closer to a point where we want people to test it - so that we can learn&improve it further. So we're planning a private test run as the first step. I'll let you know when there's more info! Hopefully, we can succeed in making 'coding sand+simulations' accessible+exciting :)

Words

I've been working hard on making the next video, ✨ NEW Cellular Automata. As part of this, I've coded some transitions for it. This time... I'm going to have lots of English (UK) phrases flying around the screen in some trippy/strange spirals.

When I first tried this, my code ran really slowly. It needs to draw thousands of little particles. And for each particle, it needs to draw a bunch of letters. Well... it turns out that drawing lots of letters is slow.

To fix this, I made it do a bit of extra work when the program loads. Instead of figuring out how to draw the phrases every-single-time, for every-single-particle... it draws every phrase ONCE at the start... and takes a photo of them. Then, it can just COPY the photo when it draws a particle (instead of pain-stakingly drawing each letter all over again).

Cheeper

I've been making another type of transition for the next video. It's going to feature fake interactions from social media.

The bird (which has recently landed on my avatar) is going to try hard to make something NEW™ to post online. But each time, the response+replies they get are... not exactly positive. I'm going to fake a few different social media networks, like twitter, discord, youtube, and some other honourable mentions.

Interestingly, this week... twitter got sold to some guy I've never heard of before. I think their name was Eli Moss or something? Ellie Mist? So for a bit of fun+learning, I tried making my own minimal twitter-style feed. Just somewhere that I can post my own little posts (for myself - and anyone else who wants to follow without joining social media).

It doesn't work yet - but I'll probably keep working on it for fun at the weekends! It's at cheeper.cool by the way.

Discord

Speaking of social media, I haven't mentioned the discord server in a while. I want to thank everyone who's part of our server. So far, it feels like a welcoming+friendly place.

It seems like people are semi-regularly posting creative things that they get up to, which is great. Personally, I really enjoy seeing the huge mix of different projects that people are working on. Including...

🐦 Updates to MFM-JS
🐦 Updates to Color Code
🐦 Social media network for frogs: Frog Chorus
🐦 Game of the Year: Pomao Falls In a Hole
🐦 Incredible fan-art by Hoophy 

Please feel free to join the server if you want. You're welcome to post things, or just watch. Or feel free to just follow along on patreon, if you want to get the occasional update instead :)

As always, thank you so much for following + supporting me, and welcome to my new patrons this week! It means the world to me! And I hope you're pleased to be supporting these projects + videos! See you next week! 🐦🐤

Days since tode went missing: 42