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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
My wife and daughter enjoy playing word games together but get frustrated when there's a single profile on a site and they can't both play. So, I thought I'd build them some word games. There's one, so far, called Charming. I've gone to great lengths to try to keep as much data as possible browser-side, so everything is stored in local storage, except when you submit your (randomly generated anonymous) player name and score to the leaderboard. The leaderboards are cleared daily (at midnight UTC). The bonuses assigned to letters and the "charms" in the game are randomized daily. Trying to come up with an intuitive scoring scheme was more of a challenge than I thought. Rewarding long words leads to people just trying to find the longest word... rewarding a word count leads to a bunch of small words. There are still some problems, but if anybody wants to try it out, here you go:
https://www.gorillasuit.io/
I'm happy to hear any feedback! Because of local storage, it may not persist your data if you play in a "wrapped" browser, like you might get when you click the link in Discord or something.
FWIW, the game Gorilla Suit comes from a time when I convinced my kids that our neighbor was wandering around in our yard in a gorilla suit. I was trying to get them to run around outside when they were being lazy.... and it worked! :)
Edit: The back end uses Django. The front end just uses Django templates, some JS, and p5.js for the game itself.
I can relate! I developed a word game (based on scrabble) two months ago, to play with my wife and colleagues, and it took me weeks to find a good scoring algorithm. And I had the exact same issue with rewarding longer words.
So in the end I'm just counting the scrabble points, + a bonus of 2 points per letter for the longest word. It's simple enough for players, and it balances the different play styles.
For now, I calculate the word scores, multiply by 10 (because higher scores are more fun), then add 1 point per letter for the longest word and 1 point per word. It seems to be working pretty well, though the magnitude of those ‘bonus’ points are off from the word scoring. It’s been a blast to develop and play with, though!
I'm working on multiple personal projects at once! I keep wanting to do something new. So I alternate between all of them depending on my mood.
Im currently:
This means I move very slowly.
While it can be rewarding to deep dive on a project / hobby, sometimes it really can be a blast to cycle through things that are catching your interest. Like you said, you just go wherever your mood takes you and inevitably some things go slower or don’t get done, but who cares?
Yeah! I do usually try to finish them. But having a few that lets you cycle through at a whim has actually helped me finish my projects rather than deep dive and get tired of it.
I do sometimes get obssed with just one project though. But till that happens, I cycle.
Would you post pictures? ^^
I'll try! It's the uploading that's troublesome.
Finally continued stitching this fading rainbow on account of time pressure since it's for a Christmas gift. It's a combination of this idea which I yoinked from the embroidery subreddit not too long ago, and a pattern from a designer called LooseThreadStitchery.
Also made this thing since I wanted more space for memorabilia on the wall but I had neither a pinboard not pins lol
Planning/thinking through how I'm going to patch/pin some more garments with band patches. I've got a vest and a jacket that are clear canvases ready to work on, a backpatch for each, and plenty of other patches and pins.
Continuing my many-weeks ongoing weekly music discovery/recommendation.
Trying to figure out some changes I'm going to make to my site.
Been writing some lyrics.
Do you mean in terms of location on them or like technically in terms of stitching? Because a totally simple stitch works all fine for patches, especially for jackets that don't really need washing so there's no risk of it fraying in the washing machine. If it does need washing, I'd recommend a blanket stitch
Oh, just the locations/themes/etc, not the stitching itself, but I still appreciate the input, as I am a complete noob to sewing. So far I have one garment I've done- a hoodie, as a learning experience, and I used running/straight stitches on it (I do it by hand). It gets washed but not super often and so far it has held up well. I might switch over to blanket (which is one of the others I've considered) if it starts being a problem.
I also use embroidery floss instead of thread because of the thickness (and due to recommendations from other metalheads)
I'm in the mulling stage of writing the sequel (...and prequel...) to my book. Mulling includes rereading the first one, since it changed so much from first to last iteration that I can't keep track of what actually happened anymore vs. what lives only in my head. My goal is to finish the reread this weekend and at least start an outline for the second one. I don't want to put pressure on myself, since that has been a great way to burn myself out, but the great news is that the gears are already turning. It's exciting to come back to it years later (oops) and look at it with new eyes.
It's not a thing I can work on as consistently as I'd like, but I've been slowly reworking the lighting/color grading in Dark Souls 2 as I play through it. There's a tool, DS2 lighting engine, that lets you make adjustments in-game to just about everything to do with light, effects, and colors.
At first, I was trying to just mimic the original game's colors/lights and make it look nicer, but as I explored the tool I ended up deciding I'd just let creativity be the guide and preserve the basic color palettes. The tool lets you do stuff like add and position suns, adjust the quality and color of shadowing, volumetric fog, it's nuts how powerful it is. And the ability to just open the menu and adjust on the fly makes for a really fun experience, of getting to a new place, clearing the area, and then adjusting every little thing until it seems good to me. I'm about 1/3 of the way through the game, when I finish it I'll see if I can share it as a mod/preset for folks.