Flatty, a digital sketchbook
I like the way you can quickly sketch music on an EP-133 K.O. II sampler. Everything about it feels immediate: you come to it with an idea and you've got it saved before you forget it.
That feeling is what I wanted to bring to Flatty. It is a sequel to a barebones command line tool I wrote to extrude sprites for a game I had started for my nephews. What I am most pleased with, in this little app, is its knack for producing happy accidents throughout a session.
Into the unknown
I have worked with PHP and JavaScript since 2012. Flatty, though, is a tool written in Go that draws its interface with raylib, the well-known C library for game developers. I have spent some of my most satisfying moments playing with Go and raylib in the past, but with so little time spent with them, I have hardly scratched the surface.
The majority of the work on Flatty is in fact learning by defeat. Who knew how much effort it takes to arrive at a usable keyboard / mouse / touchpad input system inside an immediate mode GUI, or how early in development bad architectural decisions are paid for, with the garbage collector taking its toll?
The view below starts with Flatty set up the way I like to work with it. The interface is fluid by design, and the ability to rearrange it however you like (with some limits, though) was one of the first things planned for it.
Where the dabbling went
One of the very first releases was about theming, before there was much of anything to theme, which tells you where my attention goes when nobody is watching. I am not a designer and I have no art background, but I do have a strong interest in making things look and move on the screen. One of the sources of inspiration for me has been a book called Generative Design, which treats drawing as something you can program and tune.
The view below presents one of the last major visual features added to Flatty. The "Vector pane", as it is called inside the app, rebuilds the 3D model on the 2D surface as vector graphics, simulating various painting techniques. There are nine ways of drawing it now: technical drawing, ink wash, newsprint, screentone, pastel, origami and a few others.
And this one is a visualisation of the available shading styles in Flatty. Initially the idea was that the 3D View should stay truthful to the drawn pixels, but soon I noticed (unsurprisingly) that even the simplest form, when given the right light, can bring joy and inspire further ideas. Besides, shaders can be pretty addictive!
Everything else is on its own site
Flatty, at some point, outgrew this page. It has a site of its own now, and that is where its pitch and its docs live. The handbook there is generated from the application's own documentation, so it always stays current. It goes through all the features and knobs, one by one, and can be useful for getting the user up and running.
Download and try it
It is free for personal use. There is no installer: you unzip it and run it or, in the case of the Linux AppImage, just make it runnable and open it.
How it is built
Flatty is a hobby project of mine, and as such I hold it to slightly different standards than my commercial work. When I work with clients, one of my main objectives is to know the code and its architecture. Flatty, by contrast, is a work of pure imagination, brought into existence together with my friend Claude. My own role here is to supply all the ideas and to be the top-level architect, code reviewer and tester.