Christmas Lights 2017

2017 was a year of many side projects for me. The majority of the year was focused on building my first game for GirtGames and I didn't think I'd have time to put anything together for Christmas. As is my way, however, I ran out of steam on my GirtGames project in September and felt myself being pulled back towards Christmas lights.

Not wanting to work on a project I wasn't interested in, I decided to temporarily shelve my game and throw myself back into Christmas lights. I dusted off Sparkled and got to work. I'm really proud of what I accomplished in the last three months of the year.

I started off by doing a huge refactor of the codebase. I changed the underlying database from Postgres to file-based H2 and completed loads of missing functionality. I was working away at this all through December, so I didn't have a lot of time to actually sequence the music.

A Sneak Peek

Here's a sequence playing against a shortened, instrumental version of Coldplay's A Sky Full Of Stars:

I put this together in around three hours total. I made some mistakes with the sequence and the music is a little off-sync because I hastily added a clean audio track over top of the recorded audio, but the video shows that Sparkled is capable of pulling off an awesome Christmas display.

What's Next

I'm feeling ready to jump back in to GirtGames and get my first game out to the world. I'll still be devoting lots of time to Sparkled throughout the year. I'll be adding new features and effects, rewriting the UI in React, and building a significantly better Christmas display.

I moved Sparkled to its own GitHub organisation and created some basic content for sparkled.io with the hope that a community will form around the software as it becomes more feature complete.