Prelude
Today I feel quite exhausted. I’ll take it easy and remain around the neighborhood. What needs to be done? A good aim would be to have the Bézier Game levels implemented. I could stub the stages, but I think I prefer to begin collecting actual stages. Working with real data allows you to catch problems earlier.
Work session 1 (2 hours)
5 minutes to write the stream of thought. I have been going back into habits of editing the text I write. I’ll just mark that this comes from stream of thought:
When one is not in the disposition for work, work becomes to find that disposition. I am fortunate to live in a building that has a pool and a small gym. I went to check out the gym, and though it is small, I found it challenging enough as to know it can be of good use.
I then went for a couple of underwater laps at the pool. I don’t know it’s dimensions, perhaps 12.5m x 4m? I was able to swim to one end and back. This is a good benchmark for physical progress, and I can observe (part of) my condition for this measure: 2 laps underwater.
I come back home with a much clearer mind and focused disposition. Let us now put ourselves in an appropriate workspace, and see what comes from it.
Work session 2 (2 hours, 15 minutes)
I came to the study hall closes to home for my work session. It is now deserted, but a month ago this was packed with young students for their final exams before enjoying the summer. I had a productive session, but I have the feeling I have created more work for myself instead of advancing. However, I am satisfied with the results.
I like digital products that scale to the viewport of the monitor. More than an issue of “wasting space”, it seems to me necessary to use the full dimensions available. When young and foolish I lived in Puerto Vallarta. My bedroom had “ocean view”: if you looked outside the window, it would meet directly to the window of the kitchen of a bar that actually had ocean view. You could see all through the bar and catch the tiniest frame of the horizon. Looking through this window you could see all the frames that encompassed what you actually wanted to see: the bedroom window frame, the kitchen window, the bar terrace frame, and then the ocean view.
This is the case with digital products too, the product is constrained in a monitor frame, which is constrained in an operating system frame, which is then constrained in a browser window. We have this deeply nested hierarchy of boxes and some designers think they need another frame yet!
Regarding the work actually done (and related to the nested boxes problem), I played around with the possibility of scaling the vector illustrations according to the viewport size. This could be done easily through the viewport attribute, but I’m using some filter effects which I suspect will cause problems. Instead I explored a percentage based coordinate system and it seems to be working fine. The problem is that I’m currently drawing bézier curves in my head and writing them down, perhaps I ought to have a script that could convert the hardcoded units into relative units so that I can use any svg path without having to manually transform it into the coordinate system.
The levels hack that I did yesterday has demonstrated itself to be quite flexible. I wouldn’t have implemented it this way should I start over, but it works very well in terms of interaction. Since the nature of these things are hierarchical (“stages” are contained in “levels” which are contained in a “game”, boxes again!) this would seem the natural way to structure the data. But, if you simply describe that each level contains x consecutive stages, then you don’t need to add another frame. Instead of dividing 50 apples in 5 boxes, I’m simply lining them up and putting space in groups of 5.
Afterword
I’ve decided to write the afterword in the morning of the next day because it creates some distance from the work day, then allowing a better view of it. Yesterday I found myself unsatisfied with the amount of work done, yet today it feels the rest was necessary and the manifestation is a willingness to get good work going today. I’ll begin the day then.