After silently complaining to myself about how my flowers were being rendered, yesterday I decided I’d had enough. I was previously generating a rather complicated mesh for each flower PETAL, and then compositing them all together into a flower draw call. Thousands of vertices for a flower that is at most a quarter of an inch on a retina screen. Should be easy to change it to just render a few textures instead. Eeeeeeasy peasy!

Of course I then had to change how every single texture in my game is rendered to get the layers to order correctly, but each time I jump through hoops with my renderer it gets both a little bit leaner and more general. That combo is not how coding usually goes, so that’s satisfying in its own right, but it did take significantly longer than the actual change that kicked it off.

So I’m now using hand drawn petal textures (my awful programmer art Inkscape skills are getting better!). My plan is still for them to be procedurally generated, but currently things look a bit fancier and I added a little nectar indicator which makes gathering more satisfying. A delicious slurping noise would really help though… seems easy peasy enough…

When I’m programming, or drawing generally awful cartoon bears:

I frequently tell myself “this is not the correct way to be doing this”. And I’m always right, it is not the correct way to be doing it. There’s always a way it could be faster, more elegant and cook me breakfast in the morning. And the real problem is, our always available friend ‘the internet’ (you should see it after a couple drinks!) always has an idea about how to do it better. But this path leads me to never doing anything, as you can always be reading about how to do it better.

So, I do it wrong. And most of the time it works for now, and if I need to do it ‘right’ later, I do it slightly less wrong the next time. Progress!

There’s something about the shower that is good for thinking. Maybe it’s the absolute lack of distractions. Maybe it’s the hot water (cold showers: not so good for thinking), maybe it’s the soapy suds, but inspiration seems like it tends to lurk behind shower curtains.

All this to say I had a better idea about how to control the evolution of the flowers in the shower! I’m now implementing it, which is slightly harder than it seemed in the shower, but I think it’ll work out.

Thank god I have lots of hot water.