In Which Death Learns to Glide

Having spent several days enthusiastically adding things to the website, I reached the inevitable stage of actually looking at what I’d built.

There were bugs.

Not catastrophic bugs. Nothing was on fire. Mostly.

Just the sort of small inconsistencies that become impossible to unsee once you’ve noticed them.

The project pages had accumulated slightly different behaviours as the site evolved, navigation needed tidying, duplicated bits had appeared, and several animations contained characters apparently governed by entirely different laws of physics.

So we started fixing things.

The little project-status animations got another pass. The crow representing an Active project was persuaded to stop celebrating on one leg like an overexcited Disney sidekick and behave more like an actual crow. The Dying animation was completely reconsidered: rather than wrestling Death for possession of a project, the crow now simply puts one possessive foot on the disputed shiny and stares at him.

Death, recognising a pointless argument when he sees one, gets out his book and starts the paperwork.

This led to another discovery.

Death could walk.

Technically, he could walk extremely well. His little skeletal feet moved properly. His robes responded. His knees worked. It was all very impressive.

Unfortunately, the more convincingly he walked, the less he looked like Death and the more he looked like a slightly stooped bloke in a robe going somewhere.

In one of the animations, however, he glided.

Much better.

So Death no longer walks.

He turns. He pauses. He handles his book. He can even struggle backwards across a cemetery dragging the surprisingly heavy corpse of an abandoned project.

But when Death himself wishes to travel from A to B, he simply moves.

This rule was subsequently applied to the Graveyard animation, where his excellent laborious sack-dragging entrance was preserved but his frantic little bony shuffle around the grave was quietly removed. After depositing the body and giving his customary shrug, he now glides serenely away.

Death has become considerably more otherworldly.

The crows, meanwhile, remain subject to rather more conventional physics, although two of them are currently experiencing an unexplained increase in body mass whenever they land.

That’s tomorrow’s problem.

We also fixed diary navigation, removed a few duplicated bits from the homepage, tidied links and project pages, and continued correcting the small archaeological layers left behind by repeatedly changing my mind about how the website should work.

Which, increasingly, appears to be the actual Crowdecks development methodology:

Have idea.

Build idea.

Have better idea.

Fix consequences of previous idea.

Repeat.

The website is getting better.

I’m not entirely convinced this means it’s getting closer to finished.