Hopefully you didn’t notice, but as of now, frozenfractal.com is generated by Jekyll, the static blog generator.
Since its inception in 2010, the site had been running on my own custom-written engine, Utterson. (The name was taken from another character from R.L. Stevenson’s famous novel, since both Jekyll and Hyde were already taken.) The idea behind Utterson was that I could just do a git push to a repository on my server, and the software would take care of turning it into a blog on the fly.
It’s been two weeks since I announced that Patchy was to be featured in the Play Store. This happened roughly a week ago, and it looks like it was taken down around yesterday, so it’s time for a postmortem.
I’m proud to announce that Frozen Fractal’s first Android release, Patchy, will soon be featured in the Google Play Store! I guess that means it’ll get a big banner at the top of this page, which is sure to drive some eyeballs my way. I don’t know what it is exactly that I did to make this happen, so I’m going to document what I did, in the hope that it’s useful for other developers out there.
Setup: suppose you have a monochrome texture that contains a height map. A value of 1 is highest, and 0 is lowest. You want to use this texture as a ‘bump map’ to shade a 2D polygon via GLSL, computing light and shadow from the gradient of the height map at any given point. Let’s assume there is a single light source, infinitely far away (so the light rays are parallel). This is the setup we use in the game Aranami.
Yes indeed, Frozen Fractal’s first officially released game is there! It’s called Patchy, and it’s a retro arcade-style land-grabbing game for Android. This post is about its inception and also describes some bits of the technical implementation.
Ladies and gentlemen, Frozen Fractal presents… Bigcanvas! It’s an infinite online canvas that anyone can draw on. The ‘why’ is described within the app itself, so have a look! This blogpost focuses on the technical aspects, i.e. the ‘how’.
It’s been over two months since my last post, in which I announced that I was abandoning JavaScript for the development of Turtle Paint, and switched to Ruby instead. So far, it has been a great learning experience, and I’m loving this language more every day. There are a number of interesting technical posts that I want to write about the new internals of the game, but those are for another day.
Once upon a time, over a decade ago, I wrote a simple program in C++Builder to help my father solve crossword puzzles and cryptograms. It would let you type a word with blanks such as f....al and it would tell you which words would fit.
The JavaScript server code for Turtle Paint is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. People had warned me beforehand, but there’s no teacher like first-hand experience. The problems in a nutshell:
A good selection of words is essential for a fun drawing-and-guessing game; they must neither be too easy nor too difficult. However, I’m thoroughly lazy, so I was not going to compile a word list by hand.
