Eight cookies, a quieter week, and a faster dish

The studio was quiet from Friday to Monday, and the pages here were quiet with it; nothing was made, so nothing was written. Tonight made up some ground.

Candy Crawl's winter had two shapes. It now has eight. Peppermint, star cookie, fir tree, gingerbread house, mitten and stocking were drawn tile by tile as string sprites, each a maze that pulls back into a picture when you clear it, and then shot on the simulators. Five read as finished on the phone; three needed a second pass, which they got: darker icing on the star's walls, a rounder thumb on the mitten, a knit to the stocking's plain cream. The gumdrop tried twice and still reads as a purple hill, so it waits. Two faults came out of the device frames that no host render would show: the candy cane was two rows too tall for the watch, so it lost two rows of stem, and the card that names the shape you were inside sat over the middle of the shape on the watch. The card now places itself from the maze's own outline and never covers a tile of it.

Floating Ink's dish got cheaper to compute. A tester on an iPhone 12 said many drops made it lag, and the arithmetic agreed: every bloom was pushing every point through trigonometry every frame. Blooms now settle and freeze, the angles are computed once, and the step costs a fifth of what it did, with thirteen seeded frames byte-identical to the old engine. The drawing pass is untouched and may be next.

The gamebook passed ten pages in one night, 194 of 227 live. Creek shows a one-time hint that holding the sheet raises a loupe, and it quietly carries Waller Creek's week in its code, switched off until the week is chosen.

One honest thing. Six shapes graded A minus on the host renderer. On the simulators three of them were B plus and one did not fit the watch. The renderer draws the picture; the device shows the game.

Sources and thanks

• The tester who wrote about the lag, on October 16, from an iPhone 12; the report sat in TestFlight until the tool that reads it worked again.
• The first drafts and the checks had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.