New Shoes
I bought a new pair of shoes a little before the COVID-19 quarantine stuff began, but wanted to wait until I had better socks before I subjected them to the fuzzies of death. I ordered some socks recently as well. The day my work shoes started peeling their sole off from the front was the day my new work socks arrived. Irony, serendipity? It's just weird. The new shoes are nice but I don't like breaking in new shoes. I have to 'train' the material to bend the same way my feet do. A minor complaint in the end, but still. There's more foot room in the new shoes, and the insole is evenly distributed and cut correctly. Still an improvement.
People are more open to trying alternative software to keep in touch these days. I'm coping quite well with the social distancing (you might even say it's my lifestyle, haha) but some are having a lot of trouble. I spent some time playing a game with my nephew tonight, and we used my Mumble server to chat. During this trying time, the tiny infrastructure I'm building is slowly proving its worth.
In the PICO-8 world, I've managed to put together an animation engine. It's not in a re-usable state yet, but when it is I'll be putting it into my carts collection, which isn't quite ready yet either. I'll need to build a set of animation primitives if I want complex cutscenes or precise timing. So far, I've implemented a way to move a sprite to given coordinates, and waiting for a number of frames to pass. I put together a fake 'jump' animation to get a feel for what a "real" animation would kinda look like, and it feels nice. Game animations feel like tiny scripts of behavior that run in parallel. In building the jump animation, I got to thinking about how an animation would evolve in the code. A good way to cut down on both complexity and resources would be to have fewer functions that need to be run in parallel. Some animations are easier to reason about if you separate them into tracks and then space them out with wait periods to observe behavior. Then once it's finished, you can stitch it all together in a single track, assuming other complex behavior isn't needed.
There's not much to share aside from my slowly growing collection of PICO-8 dev clips. I hope it's entertaining.
-z