So if you don't know me (or otherwise haven't noticed yet), I have a habit of hiding cute little details in the things I make. If you were around to play the game when it was live, you might remember that when you clicked the "read more" it would show a little GBC-BIOS-like animation, and a cartridge would slide into the slot before the stream started in earnest. Well, go ahead, click "read more" and let's look at that again...
Wow, blink and you'll miss it, huh? Let's break things down and take a closer look at what just happened there.
First, a closer look at the cartridge, which you could barely see in the bounds of the post anyhow:
Those of you who grew up with a GBC or have one at home: I sincerely hope you can feel that subtle little bump at the end of the insertion animation.
Also, for folks who are familiar with how the course of the game went: I promise it said "RAT PEND." on the back since before we launched. I just thought it'd be a silly way to avoid implying we were patenting anything!
(As mentioned in the original post, the Blue cartridge and the Atomic Purple GBC were both beautifully rendered by @itsonlythee for this project.)
The cartridge insertion animation was its own stand-alone GIF on the cohost CDN, but the faux-BIOS "boot-up" animation was actually the first thing written to every stream before the real game footage started being passed through. Let's compare that with the original GBC, slowed down a bit.
You might notice I picked a nice and progressive set of colors to cycle through. I, er, picked a more "left-ist" direction for the colors to go, too. The font I used to write "Pretendo" (not to be confused by the logo look-alike font of the same name!) is an artificially-bolded version of the Apple II font (which I picked because the GBC-inspired Anodyne also used it).
Well, you wouldn't *always* get the boot-up animation and the game feed when you connected. In some cases, you might've seen this message instead. (By the way, *did* you? I hope we didn't configure it too aggressively for massively multi-cohort households!)
If you were watching the stream when the server was about to go down for any reason, you'd have seen us insert these fade-out frames at the end of your GIF before closing the connection.
The little dithering effect and all that is static data; the GIF format lets us overlay one frame on top of the other--which is part of how we got the data stream so tight for normal gameplay in the first place--so it could be unceremoniously dropped in after the last gameplay frame was sent to you, without needing to do any extra processing work for every connected client while the server was shutting down. And not that it really matters as it's not a looping GIF, but the last frame there normally has a delay of 50900 centiseconds, which is roughly the length of the album version of Roundabout by Yes.
If your connection was falling behind for some reason--either the server being under too much load (it wasn't) or your client wasn't keeping up with the stream for whatever reason, you'd get one turn of this little static hourglass animation spliced into your stream while your connection's worker task reset itself to be in sync with the real-time gameplay. This occurred nine times over the two-day run. Were you one of the people who saw it, dear reader?
Oh, and if the server wasn't up, or if your connection got cut off (resulting in a "corrupt" GIF without the special trailing byte), you'd see this "we'll be right back" image.
This was just a simple CSS background-image for the main <img src="screen.gif" /> tag! The message about trying the pop-out player is there because the connection would get cut off in Firefox(-derived) browsers whenever you clicked a button--even though the buttons don't go anywhere (HTTP 204 No Content), Firefox still thinks if you clicked something you should immediately stop loading everything on the current page.
That's all I have to show for today! Tune in next time for advanced GIF-bending techniques :)
(In the meantime, check out iliana's post on another interesting bit of polish!)