12082023

Vaguely distracted throughout the day, worked inefficiently. Spent the entire day animating the opening and closing interactions with the field notebook. It’s still not done, but I am certain I can finish it by tomorrow.

I’m a bit apprehensive about how I’m going to handle page-turning, if I even want to do that at all. I could do it programmatically with a 3D surface and a shader, which would allow me to authentically preserve the contents of each page with the flipping animation since they’d be rendered directly onto the manipulated surface – but then that would compromise the quality of the animation, and I’d have to do a lot of coordinate positioning of the hand movement itself, which will be a exercise in abject tedium.

Alternately, I could animate it entirely by hand, with pre-drawn text on the pages that are affected directly by the flip. This involves a lot of sprite work, but it’ll guarantee that the hand and page turn animations are synchronised properly. The problem is that it severely limits the amount of dynamic information I can place upon each spread, as the face that will be turned has to be fixed since it’ll be pre-drawn in the page turning sprite sheet itself, instead of being rendered mathematically.

That means that, on the starting spread, only the lefthand page can be drawn via code; and for any following spreads that the player can flip to and from, only the righthand page can be drawn.

Actually, this will work well. I can have the collected IDs pinned on the lefthand side, and related notes and thoughts Avery has about them “written” on the right. This could in fact even be a hand-drawn sprite for each page…

It looks like my work is cut out for me for the next few days.