Howdy, friends of the mapper. A recent blog post over at GeekNative inferred some worry due to the lack of blog updates, so I’ve decided to write one now.
Black Lives Matter
I acknowledge that as a cisgender white male, I’ve been afforded a lot of opportunities in my life, and my work in puzzles, web app development, and other internet-based projects have afforded me an audience with a lot of people. Today I want to announce to this audience that I stand with the BIPOC community. It is not enough to not be prejudiced against others; stand up against racism and work to create real, tangible change. Listen to people of the BIPOC community that are in your communities. Shop at black businesses. Hold your elected officials accountable for the programs they fund or defund, for the people they hire and the loopholes that allow tyranny to continue to take place. There’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s not impossible.
Tile Submissions
I haven’t forgotten all of the tile submissions I’ve received. My apologies for delays; the mental stress of the state of the world has offset the free time I expected to have while staying home and social distancing. I’ll dedicate an upcoming weekend to working through my inbox and doing the necessary image editing to process submissions that have been waiting.
Mapper Updates
My current focus on the mapper’s code base involves streamlining some of the tools available for editing the map. Currently the tools form four groups in the main toolbar:
The new groupings I’m experimenting with rearrange those options so that things that generate a new map are separate from things that affect the current map you’re editing:
It’s still a work in progress, but my hope is that the clearer delineation makes it a more user-friendly experience, and makes it easier to hide the things that generate a new map behind a menu on mobile.
On the mobile view, controls are still a bit crowded and the top navigation menu is still hidden. My hope is that after some reading and UI studies, I can find ways to incorporate the non-app pages into the app UI in a way that makes sense without getting in the way.
I’ve also worked on many less-visible changes to the code that makes the app run. I hope to use those changes to get a foothold on the tile-selection feature that has been often suggested and requested.
Feedback is always welcome. The mapper’s code base can be reached at repo.davesmapper.com and pull requests are welcome.
Dave’s Other Projects
I’m continuing to write puzzles through the summer, albeit at a slower pace than I originally hoped. If you’re into word and logic puzzles, check out my puzzle site The Griddle.
This is a really fun project! Might send some tiles your way, but i wonder if some kind of guidance like “This is the kind of content for this type of tile” wouldn’t be helpful, like “x number of houses per grid mark in a city, but no more than y number of houses in a village” etc. Also, a legend might be helpful! LOL
On a more serious note, being able to zoom in and out of the page on mobile would make the designer — and the website — a lot easier to use.
Great suggestions, Anna! There’s a legend on the help page, but I didn’t realize the help page appears to currently be broken. I will look into it and get it fixed ASAP. I also have an eye on improving the mobile experience and zoom is definitely coming.
For tile content guidance, I think checking out the tiles in each mode would be a good way to get an idea of what would be compatible with the existing tiles. Beyond that, it’s kinda left up to the artist to decide how much they want to match or contrast from the other tiles. For example, with village tiles the current contributors all have roughly 5 buildings per edge tile, each about 30×30 pixels and 15 or so pixels apart from one another. You could do something similar to mesh with that, or you could add some tiles for a village that’s a bit more sparse with larger yard-type areas between homes. On the other hand, maybe it’s a village on the verge of becoming a city, and you could make extensions and outbuildings and really pack things in. Some food for thought — and often social media like Reddit, Twitter, and Mastodon have folks asking for maps that fill specific needs that might be worth catering to.