Flywriting

Our hero, after transforming mysteriously into Flyman (a normal-sized fly without superpowers), can no longer communicate in conventional human ways. Spoilers for episode 2, but he will eventually communicate with the help of a harness which sprays colorful vapor enabling "flywriting", which is just as impractical as skywriting but smaller.

Writing the story, I never knew whether a team of animators would be figuring out how to make flywriting look good (if I sold the scripts to a real studio for production) or if I was going to have to figure it out myself (which I am, because I haven't (sold the scripts)).

3 years after putting "flywriting" in a script, I've finally coded up a prototype.

Every playtester complained about my Lovecraftian walking simulator VN when I locked the player's movement at an actual walking pace to build dramatic tension. They're gonna hate this even more:



Obviously I need to figure out why it lags the frame rate, AND speed it up some, and make it look cleaner. And the lines won't appear from the top-left corner of a white-background sprite. But the idea is that it will be at least a *little* annoying, for the thematic purpose that Finn/Flyman has been robbed of his literal voice and being a fly obviously stunts his ability to connect with humans.

I had a stripped-down plan to implement Flywriting, where Flyman would just move left-to-right and typed text would appear behind him. I thought tracing out the letters of a font would be beyond my coding chops, but when I stumbled on this open-source Javascript library called PathToPoints I knew I could run with it: demo/source code

It takes any SVG image or TTF font and renders your text into a series of 2D points, which is exactly what I thought would be impossible for me to achieve in code. My game is written in Haxe and not JavaScript, so to get the letter geometry into my game, I render it at compile-time with a nodejs subprocess and pass it along. The library was written to be a web app, so I had to do a lot of fiddling with the code to make it run in a node environment.

I have no idea who made PathToPoints or what they were using it for, but I need to reach out and buy them a coffee as thanks or something.