At various times in the three months it took me to create this game, I would suffer equally from bouts of gratitude and bouts of guilt. Gratitude, because there are people and tools with which this game wouldn’t have been possible, and guilt because it’s the opposing face of gratitude when one doesn’t know how to express it. Though it is not customary to preface a product with acknowledgements, it just feels right recognize that to whom this work owes its existence.
Tools
Paper.js is incredibly intuitive for developers accustomed to working in vector editing applications (or designers who code). Layers, groups, boolean operations, primitives, blend modes, selections, segments, nodes; it’s all there. It’s fast, it’s clean and it’s a pleasure to use. My only regret is not having used it before. There’s a full write up here
anime.js is lightweight, fast, elegant. It’s so good I have little to write about it: it just works! Since it can animate object values, you can pass paper.js objects to it and they will animate as if they were made for each other.
howler.js is a javascript sound library that just works. I dislike including unnecessary code, so I naively implemented my own sound sprites, but when it came time for cross browser testing things went awry. Howler.js was a drop-in replacement and it worked like magic, cross platform issues were vanished.
d3-color is used to create the color schemes of The Boolean Game. What is crucial about d3-color is that it supports perceptually uniform color spaces. This allows you to easily change colors without messing with the luminosity or the saturation.
More tools and resources: Gulp for builds, Audacity for sound editing, sound resources come from Facebook Sound Collection, octave and Garage Band. Server is a digitalocean instance (you get $100 USD credit by signing up with that link, I get $25 but I would recommend them even without incentive). The instance runs Ubuntu with nginx as a web server. GoAccess parses the nginx logs to get the game statistics. Some tools we take for granted, but I’m particularly grateful for the existence of rsync and Sublime Text. Icons and pictograms in the game are already credited and too many to mention, but thank you so much for making this game possible.
People
René Galindo: I’m certain that without René’s support and encouragement this product wouldn’t have been possible. More than a supporter René was an accomplice, boosting in times of depletion and also providing the friction necessary to bring out the polish. Thanks René.
Sam Lown: without Sam’s generosity this wouldn’t have been possible either. His provision came at a crucial moment and was a vote of confidence. Both being men of few words, I felt an implicit agreement between us, and launching this is holding my part of the agreement. Thanks Sam.
María Munuera: former partner of Method of Action. I couldn’t help but notice I was building upon foundations we had been laid out years ago. By utter chance we became building neighbors during the first month I was creating this game. We had lunch, I told her about the project, and she was happy for me. This meant much more than what is evident from the facts. Thank you María.
Of more indirect nature, but nonetheless important to mention: Isabel Inés, to whom I owe the ground work for this period; Jordi, Marytxell and Aurora, whose temporary presence in my life marked me well beyond our experiences together and restored hope in new friendships; Javier Cañada for appearing in a dream to give me guidance on sound and also being a mentor a decade ago; to my family whose moral support has been unwavering throughout the years; and to force and nature that permeates all of existence. Thank you.
And finally, thank you for playing and reading this far. Hope you enjoyed the game.