Hey there,
Hope you made the most of Star Wars Day yesterday! Just me? Never mind 😀 I built some Star Wars Lego with my boy and then we went out and bought some Pokemon cards because he's not really into Star Wars.
The last couple of weeks I've been improving Brush Ninja, fixing some bugs, and generally doing some spring cleaning. I also updated the TShirt store. It seems the old one had stopped working (thanks to Amy for letting me know) so I changed platform to a UK company focused on sustainability.
I have also started working on a new game using Beep8. It's for an anti-capitalism game jam. I have no idea if I will finish it but I'm trying to keep the feature list small so I can get something done. I'll let you know in a future issue how I get on.
Fold Up Toys
This time I want to share a fun website rather than an app. I first found Fold Up Toys during COVID (or just after the lockdowns) and I found it a really nice distraction. The website is run by Alex Gwynne and has a whole raft of paper toys that you can download and print for free.
The toys are generally on a single sheet of paper and are designed to be cut out, folded, and glued together. There's a host of different themes, many of which are pop-culture-related with a handful of Nintendo-themed toys which I can always get behind.
Alex is an amazingly talented designer and watching them create things on YouTube I am constantly amazed at how they design these things without the use of a computer. It's all calculated in their brain.
After seeing Alex make these I was actually inspired to try to make my own toys like this. However I went down a different route and used Blender to design the 3D shapes and then exported and flattened them out to create the printable shapes. I would then colour them in once they were 2D. Despite these technical advantages, my toys still don't have the level of detail and charm that Alex's toys have.
Alex makes these toys for a living. There are free toys on the website, but they also have a Patreon where you can get access to an exclusive toy each month, and they design toys for businesses.
The Legend of Zelda: Lost in Time
This Zelda fan film is fantastic. It's a short film that captures the spirit of the games with many throwbacks to different games in the series. In particular, Ocarina of Time at the start, and later Twilight Princess and some Breath of the Wild.
If you are a fan of the different games in the series then this video may help you to understand the story a bit better. I'll be honest, I didn't get all the references at first but this helps make it all much clearer.
What gets me the most though is the fact this was made by a small team of hobbyists. When Toy Story came out they would talk about having rooms of servers generating the images, and this team used Unreal Engine to generate it in real time.
I think it's great that you can use game engines to make things like this, and that it allows regular people to create things on regular computers - that would not have been possible even 10 years ago. Plus, you know, it's Zelda my favourite game series of all time, so I am bound to enjoy it.
Sparked Discoveries
Here’s a handful of links I found intriguing recently:
BBC Login Required
This is a fun little easter egg on the BBC developer website. At the top of the page is a laptop with a blurry screen, but each time you load the page the code on the screen changes. It's blurry, but it's real code. Plus, if you click on the code you'll see that it's editable. You can copy the code, or you can edit it and put whatever you want in there. It obviously serves no purpose but for a developer it's a fun thing to include that adds a bit of personality to what is otherwise quite a dry page.
London Underground Live
I live in the countryside now but I'm a Londoner and I enjoy visiting the city when I can. The design of the tube map is iconic and has been imitated in cities around the world, but we know the map isn't an accurate representation of the city. This website shows you the real-time locations of the trains on a real map. It's very clever and looks beautiful too. I'm going to have to try it next time I'm in town, just to see how accurate it is!
'Bone collector' caterpillar wears dead insect body parts as disguise
This is a fascinating if rather disgusting article about a newly discovered carnivorous caterpillar that uses dead insect body parts as disguise. This is an example of creativity for survival. It shows how nature can be both beautiful and brutal. The caterpillar lives alongside spiders collecting the discarded remnants of the spiders' food turning itself into a trash heap the spider ignores. It's very creepy but also amazing!
The untold history of Barbie Fashion Designer, the first mass-market ‘game for girls’
Well this is a lot more interesting than I expected. Not being into Barbie (or fashion, as anyone who has met me will tell you) I haven't played Barbie Fashion Designer, but I am aware of it. That said I didn't know just what it involved. Having worked in online games I was well aware of dress up games - they're very popular. But what I didn't realise was the companies involved and more surprisingly, the fact that once you had designed an outfit you could print it onto fabric (with a home printer) and then turn it into actual clothes that your Barbie could wear. This story looks at some of the behind the scenes info and history of the game.
Have you found anything interesting lately? I’d love to hear about it, just reply to this email!
Until next time,
Ben