- Wee li'l update - 28 May 2023
Fixed some little bugs. Added option to hold shift while creating or adjusting segments to escape the snap to grid.
- Little Update - 8 May 2023
Little changes: - Scooch will move only selected segments, or all segments if none are selected. - Apply colors sequentially can now be either done in the order they were selected, or their distance from the center point - Community Hub buttons now truncate extra long titles.
- A wee lil update - Segment Groups! - 13 November 2022
SEGMENT GROUPS If you have selected any segments, and you want to remember that groups, you can press CONTROL + 1,2,3 or 4. Recall the group by pressing SHIFT + that same number. Made some other little changes... the info panel doesn't close if you drag the mouse outside the window while changing colors. Shrinkify now adjusts connected segments in all cases. That's all. Have a nice day.
- v.1.19 - G R A D I E N T S ! - 13 August 2022
GRADIENTS Gradients have come to Zen Trails! Wooooooooo! It's true. The segment info panel got a little rearranging, now with a new button called "Switch to gradient". It's a toggle for switching between gradient and single color. By default all segments are single color, as gradients really are useful in specific cases, but not most. The button will change the color picker to a gradient picker: It works just like you'd expect. Click to add colors, right click on them to delete. Tadaa! Not just the segment info panel, but also the Modify Panel and the Sequential Colors Subpanel: So I've been playing with these gradients for a few days and I've found they're really handy for long single line designs, and really bad for anything that's going to overlap itself. That's why they're disabled by default. But in specific cases you can make some pretty cool stuff now! RADIAL BACKGROUNDS I find m…
- v.1.18 - RECURSION! And also KEY BINDINGS, because why not? - 4 August 2022
So one of my favorite things to do when making spirographic masterpieces is to make some cool-looking design, then copy and past it a bajillion times while shrinking each recursion. It can make some really trippy art but the problem, as always, was that it was a tedious nightmare to do. Well... not anymore, my friends. Say hello to... RECURSION By the way if you haven't noticed, the Modify Panel got an upgrade. More on that in a bit. So now there's a shiny new button called "MAKE RECURSIVE..." which opens up the Recursion panel. You tell it how many recursions you want, and what to multiply each level by and bam! Your work of art just multiplied!: Just be careful, if you go crazy with this you can quickly accumulate thousands of segments and bog down your machine. But this makes it so easy to make your art look like it's shrinking into the distance. As you may have guessed, this pairs f…
- v1.17 - STEAM WORKSHOP INTEGRATION! SHARE YOUR DESIGNS IN GAME! - 27 July 2022
The Steam Workshop integration is finally here! I've always wanted a way to download and upload designs, and while being 100% dependent on the Steam Workshop for that to happen isn't ideal, it's a start! The Inspiration panel has gotten a major upgrade. The lightbulb button now opens up the shiny new... COMMUNITY HUB Now you can search the Steam Workshop for uploaded designs by all players, see a thumbnail image of the finished product, and read what they have to say about it. You have to be connected to Steam. If not, it'll just be blank. Worry not, the game still works just fine offline, and I even included a button called "Local Presets" which opens up the old Inspiration Panel if you want to load those designs without going through the interweb. But Steve! How do I upload my awesome creations? Well I'm glad you asked, young spirographer. I present to you... THE UPLOADER It's pretty…
- v1.16 - SEQUENTIAL COLORING, SCOOCH, QOL, AND MORE! - 21 July 2022
SEQUENTIAL COLORING SO. The other day I was making a sexy design and found myself tediously trying to create a gradient of colors across multiple segments. I did not enjoy that. I don't like doing work that a computer should be doing for me. As a result, Zen Trails now has a handy new feature: Now when you box select a group of segments, the editor window that pops up has a new button that says "Apply Colors Sequentially". You can select two colors, and it'll apply them across the segments in an even gradient. The colors are applied to the segments in the order that they're selected. If you box select them all at once, it's the order in which they were created. It's great! SCOOCH This is something I've been wanting for a while. I've added a little set of controls at the top near the navigation panel: I've sometimes found it frustrating when too many segments are close together and I hav…
- Build v1.15b - Li'l bug fixes - 18 June 2021
Fixed a bug causing jittering and moving when copying tiny segments. Added an option to disable vignette effect.
- Update 1.15 - BOX SELECT! - 27 April 2021
You can now draw a box with the mouse to select a group of segments and edit them exclusively. You can also add or remove segments while holding shift and clicking on them. I've been wanting this feature for a while and a few people have mentioned it. I've just been putting it off because I knew it was going to be a tedious pain in my butt to implement. I was correct. But now that it's done I've already found it to be incredibly useful. Draw a box with the mouse: This menu pops up when there are more than one segment selected: It's basically just the Moidfy panel and the segment info panel combined. Any changes made here will only affect the selected segments. Hope you like it. Stephen
- Update 1.14 - SHRINKIFY and SPIRALIZE! - 18 March 2021
So in my eternal quest to make digital spirography both fun and accessible, I've been trying to come up with helpful tools to allow users to make designs that are more complex and interesting without needing to know the nitty gritty math. You may remember the recent addition of the "Windmillize" button. SPIRALIZE and SHRINKIFY These are newly added feature buttons found in the "Modify" panel. Clicking them will alter your design by adding intermediary segments in between your existing ones, preserving the general design but causing it to slowly morph while playing. Here we see the original 2-segment design, and the results of clicking the "Spiralize All" and "Shrinkify All" buttons respectively: I won't go into too much detail about what they actually do, but these results should give you a pretty good idea. "Spiralize" makes your design spiral inward, and Shrinkify makes it shrink with…
- Major Update! - Tutorial overhaul and some new features! - 28 January 2021
TUTORIAL OVERHAUL In preparation for the iOS release of ZenTrails, I thought it was time to revisit the tutorial. In having my friends and family play the game, the main bit of feedback I got was that they wanted more explanation on how to make aesthetic designs. After all, not everyone wants to spend their whole weekend tweaking numbers to see what works and what doesn't. So the tutorial has been completely redone, now with categories, and almost 100 slides with presets and explanations all made by me. It will walk you through everything I've learned about digital spirographing from the simplest shapes to complex masterpieces. I hope you'll check it out and let me know if you run into any bugs, or if you find anything confusing that could be explained better. NEW FEATURE - "WINDMILLIZE" This is explained in detail in the tutorial, but I've realized while making complex designs that I o…
- Update v.1.12 - Huge Optimizations! - 21 December 2020
So I was working on making a cool promo video for Zen Trails featuring some complex designs, and I noticed that the framerate really starts to suffer if I get too many segments on screen at once. This struck me as weird cause they're just lines and dots, and not even moving. I mean it should be able to handle thousands on even the cheapest computer, but I was getting less than 20fps with a mere 200 segments on screen. Not cool. On top of that, some saves were taking 10-20 seconds to load, and they're less than 40KB! So I spent the last week or so digging into this. Some things that make perfect sense when you start developing a game/app are completely non-sensical by time you're done. When I first started putting Zen Trails together I figured it would be smart to have every segment have its own info panel where all of its relevant info is stored(ie, speed, length, etc). That made sense…
- Update v1.11 - New Music! - 1 December 2020
I've made two new tracks for Zen Trails. They're called "Dreams" and "Space". I really hope you're enjoying the music in-game. It's always mute-able if it gets too annoying ;)
- HUGE UPDATE! v.1.10 - 30 November 2020
I've been busy! Here's a list of all the fun stuff I've been working on, and I've made some new music which will be added in a day or two here. The Inspiration Panel is drastically improved. Lots of new presets made by me and a few very helpful community members. It's now a button in the bottom right corner with a picture of a lightbulb. Clicking on it will bring up the panel. The "Fade Trails" option is now part of the save file. It occurred to me that since your design can look dramatically different depending on whether or not your trails are fading, this should be specific to each save file. Files made previous to this update have trail fading disabled by default. Glow has been added to the new segment default settings and to the Modify All panel. There are two new buttons in the Modify All panel for sorting out your layers quickly and easily. In working with the game I realized tha…
- Update v1.09 - Color Palettes! - 24 October 2020
I've gotten a lot of requests for this and it makes sense. But it's not just a custom palette, there's presets! Made by me! If you open any color picker, like on a segment or the settings panel for example, you'll see the palette as well as a button to select a preset. These presets will give you a cohesive theme, or you can just make your own. Note that whatever the palette is when you close the game, that's what it'll be when you open it again. https://imgur.com/a/3D4zbDe But I didn't stop there! I thought to myself, wouldn't it be handy if the palette decides what colors your new segments are? So I added a little toggle in the settings panel that says "Random Color From Palette", so any new segments made with that selected will be assigned randomly from whatever the palette is currently set to. BUT WAIT, there's more! If you click on the "Modify All" button in the settings panel, you…
- Update v1.08 - Revamped UNDO, REDO, and bonus camera tracking! - 18 October 2020
Hello lovely people. First of all, I can't thank you all enough for playing my game. It validates my existence. UNDO / REDO I've been listening to your feedback! And now I have a fresh new undo system in place, and not only that, but a fancy schmancy REDO system as well! So, if you've ever done any programming you may or may not be aware of a what a challenge it is to implement a quality undo/redo system. Even in a program as simple as Zen Trails there's a lot of moving pieces (literally, lol, I'm so funny). My previous system was just sort of a placeholder, and it basically just made a save every time you create, delete, or move segments, and then loaded the previous "undo" save when you hit control-Z. Which works! Except that it didn't take into account any little change made to a segment's info panel. This new system is probably not perfect, but it's better. Pretty much any change yo…
- Update v1.07 - It's GLOW TIME! - 9 October 2020
In this update, there's a new slider added to the segment info panel called "GLOW". If it's set to anything other than zero, the trail will emit a beautiful glow when sequencing. Here's some things to consider: 1. This increases the brightness of a trail, which in computer-speak means that the more glow you add, the closer to white the color will become. There's no such thing as black emission. So your colors may look a little different. 2. This looks significantly better on a dark background. It doesn't have to be straight black, but some colors have a hard time glowing against light backgrounds, like purple for example. You'll barely see it against a light color. 3. The segment node will show you what the trail color is going to look like. The color selection box doesn't change, for ease of use when selecting your base color. I can't wait to see what kind of funky florescent glory you…
- Update v1.06 - Layer order sorting. - 6 October 2020
There's now an input field in the "MORE" tab of a segment's info panel called "Layer Order" which will determine what line goes on top if two or more lines cross over each other. The highest number wins. By default they're all set to 1 so I guess the computer just picks its favorite in that case.
- Update v1.05 - Save files can now be deleted. - 2 October 2020
Now if you open the save menu and hover over the save file that you hate the most, a cute little trash can button will appear on the right side of it. Click it and confirm, and you'll never hear from it ever again.
- Update v1.04 - Changeable background color - 30 September 2020
Simply click on the "Themes" button, then click on "Simple" which will give you a plain grey-ish background, and a color picker will open up allowing you to change it to whatever color your heart desires.
