Feels like such a short amount of time since my last week in review. (That's because I wrote the last one on Sunday.)
The one thing I missed out on when visiting Disneyland last week was having a drink at Trader Sam's Enchanted Tiki Bar, nestled within the grounds of the Disneyland Hotel. Instead, on Saturday I went to the newest incarnation of Lucky Tiki in Highland Park with Amy. It was great! It's small but didn't feel too crowded. They did a terrific job of making the space feel haphazard and lived-in without also feeling shitty and messy. The cocktail I ordered triggered an animatronic to come alive above the bar. This was unintentional, but on some cosmic level I believe it was no accident.
No updates on Dollhouse since a few days ago, but I have been trying to get familiar again with Blender in preparation for this game jam next week. Much like with the last game jam I participated in, I am coming in hot with a preconceived notion of what I want to make and hoping I can meet the theme purely through asset creation. If I can't, I'll bail! It's no problem!
I watched this great demonstration by shader legend Inigo Quilex of generating a rough-hewn brick tower with signed distance fields and learned a cool trick for pseudo-random number generation: take the sine of a huge number such that the frequency is too high to detect a pattern. So simple! SDFs really broke my brain once I finally managed to understand them.
A couple times a year I get the urge to write some code to generate some abstract looping visuals. It happened again when I learend that random sine trick. This time I turned that into a tool, which I have very cleverly called Visuals. It's got an area where you can write some Javascript that outputs a color given an X/Y coordinate, shader-style, and the result is full-screen behind your code. Also heavily inspired by tixy.land, to which I paid tribute in the function arguments. Theoretically great for a live-coding performance; in practice I will just muck about in it once in a while. I kind of want to add support for MIDI controllers too though…